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IRVING 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



<2T&e HHtmpite biographical &erie? 



i. ANDREW JACKSON, by W. G. Brown. 

2. JAMES B. EADS, by Louis How. 

3. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, by Paul E. 

More. 

4. PETER COOPER, by R. W. Raymond. 

5. THOMAS JEFFERSON, by H. C. Mer- 

WIN. 

6. WILLIAM PENN, by George Hodges. 

7. GENERAL GRANT, by Walter Allen. 

8. LEWIS AND CLARK, by William R. 

LlGHTON. 

9. JOHN MARSH ALL, by JamesB. Thayer. 

10. ALEXANDER HAMILTON, by Chas. A. 

CONANT. 

11. WASHINGTON IRVING, by H. W. Boyn- 

TON. 

12. PAUL JONES, by Hutchins Hapgood. 

13. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, by W. G. 

Brown. 

14. SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN, by H. D. 

Sedgwick, Jr. 

15. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, by Hor- 

ace E. SCUDDER. 

Each about 140 pages, i6mo, with photogravure 
portrait, vols. 1-9, 75 cents ; other subsequent 
vols., each 65 cents, net; School Edition, 
each, 50 cents, net. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

Boston and New York. 



QHje fotoersfoe Biographical Series 

NUMBER 11 

WASHINGTON IRVING 

BY 

HENRY W. BOYNTON 





Ji. 



It^l^ls^^^ 



WASHINGTON IRYING 



BY 



HENRY W. BOYNTON 










BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1901 



1 



r 






THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Cop-ea Received 

OCT. 21 1901 

COPVRIOHT ENTRY 

CLASS £L-XXo. No 
COPY B. 



COPYRIGHT, I90I, BY HENRY W. BOYNTON 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published October, igoz 



I 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Early Years and Surroundings . . 1 

II. Man about Town ..... 16 

III. Man of Letters — Fdrst Period . . 35 

IV. Man op Letters — Second Period . 59 
V. A Public Character 81 

VI. The Man Himself 105 



WASHINGTON IRVING 



EARLY YEARS AND SURROUNDINGS 

Irving's name stands as the first land- 
mark in American letters. No other Amer- 
ican writer has won the same sort of recog- 
nition abroad or esteem at home as became 
his early in life. And he has lost very little 
ground, so far as we can judge by the appeal 
to figures. The copyright on his works ran 
out long since, and a great many editions 
of Irving, cheap and costly, complete and 
incomplete, have been issued from many 
sources. Yet his original publishers are now 
selling, year by year, more of his books than 
ever before. There is little doubt that his 
work is still widely read, and read not be- 
cause it is prescribed, but because it gives 
pleasure ; not as the product of a " standard 



2 WASHINGTON IRVING 

author," but as the expression of a rich and 
engaging personality, which has written it- 
self like an indorsement across the face of 
a young nation's literature. It is that of a 
man so sensitive that the scornful finger of 
a child might have left him sleepless ; so 
kindly that nobody ever applied to him in 
vain for sympathy ; so modest that the small- 
est praise embarrassed him. His manner 
and tastes were simple and unassuming. He 
had no great_g&s_sions ; the brother was 
stronger in him than the lover. To these 
qualities, which might by themselves belong 
to ineffectiveness, he added courage, firm- 
ness, magnanimity. It was because he was 
such a man, and because what he was shines 
on every page he wrote, that the world still 
warms to him. 

Not that so elusive a thing as personal 
charm can be neatly plotted by the card. 
We love certain people because we love 
them ; and since that is so, everything they 
do is interesting to us. A great writer lives 
in his books, to be sure, but we want to 
know what he actually did in the flesh. Did 



EARLY YEARS 3 

he walk, eat, sleep, like other men? Was 
he as strong, as human, as lovable as one 
would think ? What sort of boy was he ? 
Did he marry a wife, and was she good 
enough for him ? The world will never be- 
lieve that such questions are impertinent. 

There are, of course, more formal matters 
to be considered, — his debt to circumstance, 
his place in the practical world, his influence 
on the moral or intellectual or national life 
of his day. Some of these themes may be 
touched on, even within the narrow limits 
of the present sketch ; not categorically, but 
rather by way of such suggestion and indi- 
rection as may be consistent with a compact 
narrative. 

One of those apparent chances which are 
the commonplaces of history led William 
Irving from his far home in the Orkneys, 
married him to Sarah Sanders, and made 
him the father of Washington Irving. The 
Irvings — a branch of the well-known Scotch 
Irvines — had been for generations the lead- 
ing family on the Island of Shapinsha. 



4 WASHINGTON IRVING 

Finally they had gone threadbare, and with 
a fortune to seek, William Irving chose the 
natural ordeal for an islander, the trial by 
sea. Toward the close of the French War 
he had become petty officer on an armed 
English packet. In New York he met 
Mistress Sanders, who was also English-born, 
and in 1761 they were married. He must 
have saved money, for at the end of the war 
he left the sea, and entered trade in New 
York. 

William Irving and his wife were very 
different in up-bringing and in temperament. 
He was a stern man, a strict Presbyterian, 
with the cold fire of Calvin in his bones. 
She had been bred an Episcopalian, and was 
genial and sympathetic by nature. The 
husband was the master-spirit, and the chil- 
dren grew up under the rigid exactions of 
his sect. Sunday was a long day of penance, 
and one of their two half -holidays was conse- 
crated to the cheerful uses of the catechism. 
To New England ears it all has a familiar 
sound. When the children grew old enough 
they promptly left the fold and resigned 



EARLY YEARS 5 

themselves to her of Babylon and England. 
There were eleven of them, and Washington 
was the youngest, born in New York, April 
3, 1783. As a very little child he had the 
honor of a pat on the head from his great 
namesake, for whom he was to do an impor- 
tant service many years later. 

He was a perfectly normal, healthy boy. 
Fortunately there are no brilliant sayings to 
record ; he did not lisp in periods. Genius 
was not written upon his brow, nor tied 
upon his sleeve. He had none of the pale 
fervor of precocity, or the shyness of prema- 
ture conceit. He was absorbed in childish 
things, loved play, shirked his studies, 
dreamed of a life on the ocean wave, and 
regarded " Eobinson Crusoe " and " Sinbad 
the Sailor " as the end of all literary things. 
The savagery of boyhood he lacked. He was 
fond of playing battle, but could not bear to 
see his schoolfellows publicly thrashed, ac- 
cording to the amiable custom of that day. 
Otherwise he was all that a mother might 
deplore or an uncle delight in. 

Altogether the most interesting story of 



6 WASHINGTON IRVING 

his schooldays has a dramatic setting. Ad- 
dison's " Cato " was to be spouted in public 
by the schoolchildren. Irving, in the part 
of Juba, was called a little sooner than he 
expected, and came on the boards with his 
mouth full of honey-cake. Speech was out 
of the question — vox haesit — there was a 
momentary deadlock in his throat. The 
audience began to laugh, but the prince was_ 
not to be counted out. With a skillful rotary 
finger he removed the viand, and brought 
down the house by calmly taking up his 
lines as if nothing had happened. He was 
then ten years old, and deep in love with the 
leading lady. A year or two later he had 
decided to follow the sea; but a short ex- 
periment of sleeping on the floor and eating 
salt pork was too much for his enthusiasm, 
and at fourteen he gave up the ship. By 
this time he had begun to fancy that he 
could write, but there is nothing preserved 
which shows the least promise. 

" When I was young," he said long after- 
ward, " I was led to think that somehow 
or other everything that was pleasant was 



EARLY YEARS 7 

wicked." The theatre was one of the for- 
bidden sweets, and he naturally seized every 
chance to taste it. Family prayers at nine 
were something of an interruption, but he 
had managed a private exit by way of the 
roof which got him back to the theatre in 
time for the after-piece. This early liking 
for the stage he never outgrew. In the 
meantime he was going through with the 
ordinary schooling of the New York boy of 
that period. He learned a little Latin ; he 
hated mathematics, and had very little love 
for dull books of any sort. At sixteen his 
formal education was over. Two of his elder 
brothers had studied at Columbia College, and 
no doubt Irving might have done the same. 
He was too lazy, or, to put it more grace- 
fully, too little interested in set tasks. Later 
he expressed regret for the lost chance, but 
the loss cannot have been very great for him 
or for us. If we could imagine that he 
might have gained any sort of scholarship, 
its effect upon his writing would still be 
more than doubtful. His order of genius 
gains little from bookishness. Addison was 



8 WASHINGTON IRVING 

supposed to be a classical scholar, but the 
" De Coverley Papers " are not a product of 
scholarship, and we could better spare any- 
thing else that he wrote. 

At sixteen Irving entered a law office, 
and for the next five years was understood 
to be studying law. He had no real apti- 
tude for such study, to be sure, and must 
have known it; certainly he learned very 
little law. He had other things to be in- 
terested in. He was an eager reader in his 
own way, and a handsome, well-mannered 
boy, already fond of society. And I doubt 
if very much was expected of him in the way 
of steady application, for during this whole 
period his health was uncertain. More than 
once he had to give up study entirely, and 
go to this watering-place or that for weeks 
or months. His family and friends were 
afraid of consumption, and it was against 
all forecasts that he held his own till man- 
hood. 

In 1800 he made his first voyage up the 
Hudson. " A voyage to Albany then," he 
wrote in 1851, " was equal to a voyage to 



EARLY YEARS 9 

Europe at present, and took almost as much 
time." The journey was made in a sloop 
manned by slaves, and commanded by a 
native of Albany, who spoke nothing but 
Dutch. 

Two years later his brother Peter became 
proprietor and editor of the New York 
" Morning Chronicle," for which Irving pre- 
sently wrote a series of satirical letters signed 
Jonathan Oldstyle." In these letters, his 
earliest work of any significance, he touches 
the Addisonian string upon which his critics 
have harped so insistently ever since. They 
are decidedly clever for a boy of nineteen, 
but not cleverer than the best college work 
of to-day, and perhaps more consciously imi- 
tative. The fact that they were greatly 
praised and gained some vogue through 
copying in other journals, is rather an in- 
dication of the unfruitfulness of the period 
than of their merit. One of their greatest 
admirers was Charles_Brockden Browne, the 
only Amercian before Irving to make a pro- 
fession of writing. 

In 1804 the young amateur came of age. 



10 WASHINGTON IRVING 

He was still threatened with consumption, 
and his family determined to send him 
abroad. Notfody felt very sanguine about 
his returning. As he was helped on board, 
the captain eyed him dubiously and said in 
an undertone, " There 's a chap who will go 
overboard before we get across." If it had 
been in him to die just then, the captain 
gave him plenty of time ; it was six weeks 
later when they landed at Bordeaux. But 
though the voyage had been not over-com- 
fortable, it did him much good. Before the 
end of it he was scrambling about the vessel, 
and describes himself as " quite expert at 
climbing to the masthead, and going out on 
the maintopsail yard." Irving's body was 
never to be altogether tractable, but we 
shall hear nothing further of the consump- 
tive tendency. 

His early letters from abroad are full of 
life and spirits. He jaunted about through 
France and Italy, picked up acquaintances 
everywhere, and was evidently much more 
interested in the people he met than in the 
" doing " of buildings or galleries. Evi- 



EARLY YEARS 11 

dently he was growing stronger all the time. 
In the company of a little Pennsylvania 
doctor, whom he had picked up in a dili- 
gence, he played several boyish pranks in 
France; he kicked out an insolent porter 
at Montpellier, and fell foul of a police spy 
at Avignon. In the main, however, he was 
inclined to take things as they came. " There 
is nothing I dread more," he wrote from Mar- 
seilles, "than to be taken for one of the 
Smellfungi of this world. I therefore en- 
deavor to be pleased with everything about 
me, and with the masters, mistresses, and 
servants of the inns, particularly when I 
perceive they have ' all the dispositions in 
the world ' to serve me ; as Sterne says, 
1 It is enough for Heaven, and ought to be 
enough for me.' " 

At that day the European traveler was 
not hedged in from adventure. On the way 
from Genoa to Messina Irving' s vessel was 
boarded by a piratical picaroon. The con- 
sequences were not dreadful, but the mise en 
scene was all that could have been desired. 
The pirates had " fierce black eyes scowling 



12 WASHINGTON IRVING 

under enormous bushy eyebrows. . . . They 
seemed to regard us with the most malignant 
looks, and I thought I could perceive a sinis- 
ter smile upon their countenances, as if tri- 
umphing over us, who had fallen so easily 
into their hands." Nothing could have been 
more satisfactory. At Termini he had a ro- 
mantic adventure with a masked Turk. At 
Genoa he was captivated by the beauty of a 
young Italian lady. Instead of trying to 
make her acquaintance, as he might easily 
have done, he contented himself with steal- 
ing a handkerchief which she had dropped. 
Some time later it was stolen from him. 
Thereupon he wrote an account of the affair 
to a friend whom he had left in Genoa. The 
lady heard of it, as ladies will, and sent him 
a lock of her hair, with a friendly hint that 
she might be better admired at closer quar- 
ters. By a natural paradox of boyish senti- 
ment he did not return to Genoa, but had 
the hair put into a locket, which he wore for 
years. It was later unearthed by a friend 
from a pair of breeches borrowed from Ir- 
ving, and made the subject of some badinage 
between them. 



EARLY YEARS 13 

Both his brothers and his biographer have 
made the aimlessness of this first European 
experience an occasion for something like re- 
proach. His plans were of the vaguest. 
Such as they were, he was willing to sacri- 
fice any of them for the sake of congenial 
companionship. After a few weeks he left 
Rome hurriedly because he could not bear 
to be parted from a friend who was going to 
Paris. He was anxious, he told his brothers 
quaintly, to study various arts and sciences 
there. In Paris he kept a journal for about 
three weeks; it records attendance upon a 
single lecture in botany and seventeen the- 
atrical performances. Naturally his brothers 
could only see that he was an amiable, idle 
young fellow, who had drifted into a dilet- 
tante attitude toward life, and showed little 
promise of usefulness. But idling as well 
as industry has to be judged by its fruits. 
He was in a real sense seeing life, as he per- 
sonally needed to see it, not in its passion 
and mystery, but in its lighter moods of hu- 
mor and sentiment. Paris frankly seemed 
to him at this time the most profitable place 



14 WASHINGTON IRVING 

in the world. Two months after his arrival, 
he wrote airily, " You will excuse the short- 
ness and hastiness of this letter, for which 
I can only plead as an excuse that I am a 
young man and in Paris." He had momen- 
tary fancies as to a possible direction for his 
talents. A sudden intimacy at Rome with 
Washington Allston made him think for a 
time of turning painter. He was something 
of a dandy, and puts on record a Paris cos- 
tume of " gray coat, white embroidered vest, 
and colored small-clothes." Presently he 
left Paris for London, where Kemble and 
Mrs. Siddons seem to have pleased him more 
than anything else English. Three months 
later he set sail for New York, and arrived 
in March, 18$ 6, after an absence of nearly 
two years. 

Irving was now twenty-three years old. 
All that he had done so far was haphazard 
enough. He had trifled with his schooling, 
loitered over his law, read a great deal at 
random, seen many theatres, and made many 
friends. He had escaped from the valley of 
the shadow, and was now free to go on in the 



EARLY YEARS 15 

primrose way of much society, little litera- 
ture, and less law. For the next ten or 
twelve years he was to be little more than 
a petted man about town. 



n 

MAN ABOUT TOWN 

At that time New York was hardly more 
than a big village, such as Boston continued 
to be for a half-century later. Everybody 
(who was anybody) knew everybody else in 
the friendly and informal way which nowa- 
days belongs to a " set." Conviviality — 
this dignified name of the thing best suggests 
the way in which it was looked at then — 
was as much a part of fashionable life in 
New York as in Edinburgh or London. Into 
this society Irving entered with zest, flirting, 
dancing, tippling with other young swagger- 
ers according to the mode. He went back 
nominally to his legal studies, but was really 
very little concerned with law or gospel. Of 
this kind of life, u Salmagundi," the first num- 
ber of which appeared in January, 1807, 
was the legitimate outcome. It was made 
up of short satirical sketches of the " Spec- 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 17 

tator " type. Irving and J. K. Paulding 
were the principal contributors, but they had 
some assistance from William Irving and a 
few others. In the course of a year twenty 
numbers were published at irregular inter- 
vals, when they suddenly ceased to appear. 
The authors, who wrote under fictitious 
names, affected from the start complete in- 
difference to fame or profit. Their purpose, 
they said with whimsical assurance, was 
simply "to instruct the young, reform the 
old, correct the town, and castigate the age." 
The audacity of the thing caught the town ; 
it was a decided success, and very profitable 
— for the publisher. There is a mildly 
sophomoric flavor about the " Salmagundi " 
papers, as there is about Irving' s letters of 
the same period. But they are full of amus- 
ing things, and worth reading, too, for the 
odd side-lights they throw upon the foibles 
of that old New York. 

As he grew older, Irving came to feel the 
shallowness of fashionable society, but in the 
Salmagundi days he appears to have asked 
for nothing better. He had good looks, 



18 WASHINGTON IRVING 

good humor, and good manners, showed a 
proper susceptibility, and knew how to turn 
a compliment or write a graceful letter. No 
wonder he found himself welcome wherever 
he went. After a visit to Philadelphia one 
of the ladies to whom he had made himself 
agreeable wrote, " Half the people exist but 
in the idea that you will one day return." 

Early in the following year he had a 
little experience of the practical working of 
ward politics, which he described in a letter 
to a certain charming Mary Fairlie : " Truly, 
this saving one's country is a nauseous piece 
of business, and if patriotism is such a dirty 
virtue, — prythee, no more of it. . . . Such 
haranguing and puffing and strutting among 
the little great men of the day. Such shoals 
of unfledged heroes from the lower wards, 
who had broke away from their mammas, 
and run to electioneer with a slice of bread 
and butter in their hands." Irving's patriot- 
ism was not found wanting when the time 
came, but he had a life-long contempt for 
the petty trickery of party politics. That 
year he made another of his leisurely jaunts, 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 19 

nominally on business, this time to Vir- 
ginia. His letters record the usual round 
of social gallantries, and some graver matter. 
Burr's trial was on in Richmond. Irving 
made his acquaintance, and was retained in 
some ornamental sense among his counsel. 
One or two letters from Richmond show a 
sentimental sympathy for his client of which 
the less said the better. A characteristic 
weakness of Irving' s was always an unrea- 
soning fondness for the under dog. In the 
autumn of 1807 his father died, one of the 
most sincere among the " unco guid," a man 
whom few people loved and everybody re- 
spected. 

Not long after the discontinuance of the 
Salmagundi papers a new idea suggested it- 
self to Irving and his brother Peter, which 
in its original form does not look especially 
promising. It was to develop into a really 
remarkable work, and to place Irving's 
name in a secure place among living humor- 
ists. The " Knickerbocker History of New 
York " really laid the foundation of his fame. 
The first plan was for a mere burlesque 



20 WASHINGTON IRVING 

of an absurd book just published, a Dr. 
Samuel Mitchill's " Picture of New York." 
Mitchill began with the aborigines : the 
Irvings began with the creation of the world. 
Fortunately Peter was soon called away to 
Europe, and Irving was left to his own de- 
vices, which presently took a different and 
more original turn. He threw out most of 
the pompous erudition which belonged to 
the work as a burlesque, and condensed what 
remained. Everything after the five intro- 
ductory chapters is his own. 

At this time he had begun to do com- 
mission business for certain New York 
houses, with a genuine impulse toward stead- 
iness and industry which it is easy to ac- 
count for. He was deep in love with the 
second daughter of Mr. Hoffman, in whose 
office he had originally idled. He had been 
for years very intimate with the family, and 
had ended by making a remarkable discovery 
about one of them. As he was evidently not 
in a position to marry, he was now setting 
to work with real energy to improve his 
means. 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 21 

Matilda Hoffman was a girl of seventeen, 
pretty, amiable, and clever. She died of 
quick consumption in April, 1809. It is 
certain that they loved each other very much, 
and that Irving never forgot her. The claim 
put forth by his nephew and biographer that 
he gave up marriage for her sake, and was 
romantically scrupulous in his faithfulness 
to her memory, seems hardly borne Out by 
the facts. He was crushed for the moment, 
but not heartbroken. The truth is Irving's 
nature was sentimental rather than passion- 
ate. His love for Miss Hoffman appears to 
have been the deepest feeling of his life, 
but it did not absorb his whole nature. The 
first effect of her loss was to fill him with 
a sort of horror — the rebellion of a young 
and sensitive health against the tyranny of 
death. It was enough to show that the 
mourner was by no means in desperate case, 
for extreme grief is not afraid. In after 
life he never mentioned her name, and 
wrote of her only once. At the same time 
pretty faces and the charm of womanly 
companionship continued to attract him ; 



22 WASHINGTON IRVING 

indeed, a few years later he openly expressed 
his expectation of some time marrying. That 
he did not was clearly due to temper and 
circumstance rather than to romantic fidel- 
ity, or abnegation. In the end his suscepti- 
bility became purely impersonal ; his satis- 
faction in the exercise of a gentle old-school 
gallantry did much to take the sting from 
his life-long bachelorhood. Plainly, Irving 
was the sort of man who finds a grace in 
every feminine presence. 

It is encouraging to find him in a few 
months at work again upon the Knicker- 
bocker history. Its appearance was cleverly 
heralded by a series of preliminary advertise- 
ments, announcing the disappearance of one 
Diedrich Knickerbocker, and the finding of 
a manuscript history by his hand. The 
book was published in December, 1809, and 
made a remarkable impression, in England 
as well as in America. Henry Brevoort, a 
close friend of Irving's, in 1813 sent a copy 
of the second edition to Walter Scott, who 
wrote at once : " I beg you to accept my 
best thanks for the uncommon degree of 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 23 

entertainment which I have received from 
the most excellently jocose History of New 
York. ... I have never read anything so 
closely resembling the style of Dean Swift 
as the annals of Diedrich Knickerbocker. 
I have been employed these few evenings in 
reading them aloud to Mrs. Scott and two 
ladies who are our guests, and our sides 
have been absolutely sore with laughing. I 
think, too, there are passages which indicate 
that the author possesses powers of a differ- 
ent kind, and has some touches which remind 
me much of Sterne." 

The work in its completed form is a 
history of the three Dutch governors of 
New York, whom Irving uses as a stalking- 
horse for purposes of satire. Everybody 
laughed at it except a few descendants of the 
old Dutch worthies with whose names and 
characters he had made free. As late as the 
year 1818, G. C. Verplanck, a personal 
friend of Irving's, called him to account in 
an address before the New York Historical 
Society, to which the first edition of Knicker- 
bocker was gravely dedicated, for " wasting 



24 WASHINGTON IRVING 

the riches of his fancy on an ungrateful 
theme, and his exuberant humor in a coarse 
caricature." One of his brothers wrote to 
Irving, deprecating the attack. Irving re- 
plied : " I have seen what Verplanck said 
of my work. He did me more than justice 
in what he said of my mental qualifications ; 
and he said nothing of my work that I have 
not long thought of it myself. ... I am sure 
he wishes me well, and his own talents and 
acquirements are too great to suffer him to 
entertain jealousy ; but were I his bitterest 
enemy, such an opinion have I of his in- 
tegrity of mind, that I would refer any one 
to him for an honest account of me, sooner 
than to almost any one else." 

Soon after Knickerbocker came out, Ir- 
ving went to Albany in the fruitless pursuit 
of a minor court appointment. There he 
found his name come not altogether plea- 
santly before him. " I have somehow or 
another formed acquaintance with some of 
the good people," he wrote, " and several of 
the little Yffrouws, and have even made my 
way and intrenched myself strongly in the 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 25 

parlors of several genuine Dutch families, 
who had declared utter hostility to me." 
One lady had said that if she were a man she 
would horsewhip him; but an hour with 
Irving, who had made a point of meeting 
her, left her resigned to be a woman. 

Irving had now scored his first great 
literary success. He had proved himself 
master of a fluent humorous style which 
might have been applied indefinitely to the 
treatment of similar themes. He was twenty- 
seven years old, and there was no reason 
why the next ten years should not be a most 
fruitful period. Unfortunately, during most 
of that time life was made too easy for him. 
He knew now that he could write, but he 
had no desire to write for a living. Probably 
he felt that such a course would be in some 
way not quite suitable for a man of fashion. 
At all events, ten years passed, and middle 
age was at hand before the promising author 
began to fulfill his promise. Not till 1819 
appeared his next literary venture, conceived 
in a more serious spirit, and launched with 
many misgivings as the first performance of 
the professional man of letters. 



26 WASHINGTON IRVING 

He had by this time pretty much given up 
any notion he may have had of living by the 
law. His attempts to gain civil appoint- 
ments were not successful. The brilliant 
younger brother must be provided for ; pre- 
sently Peter and Ebenezer, who were proprie- 
tors of a fairly prosperous hardware business, 
offered him a partnership, with nominal du- 
ties and one fifth of the profits. His con- 
nection with the firm was at first a sinecure. 
Later, and when the business had come to 
the brink of failure, the burden fell upon 
him, and absorbed his whole time and ener- 
gies for nearly two years. His literary 
idling cannot be said to have been due to 
this entanglement. In his view writing was 
apparently little more than an agreeable in- 
dulgence which had brought him some half- 
deserved praise, and a pleasant social recog- 
nition in desirable quarters. One of the 
first results of his new connection was a visit 
to Washington, ostensibly in the interests of 
the business. The character of his services 
may be surmised from the fact that his jour- 
ney from New York to Washington, via 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 27 

Philadelphia and Baltimore, consumed nine- 
teen days ; and that was when the affairs of 
the firm were in some straits, and supposed 
to be particularly in need of representation 
at Washington. 

In 1812 he accepted the editorship of a 
periodical called " Select Reviews," to which 
during the next two years he contributed va- 
rious critical and biographical articles. He 
found little to his liking in the editorial and 
still less in the critical part of his work. " I 
do not profess," he wrote, " the art and mys- 
tery of reviewing, and am not ambitious of 
being wise or facetious at the expense of 
others." He was never a good critic, for he 
was too soft-hearted, and too little in conceit 
with his own judgment to give an unfavor- 
able opinion. And this was in the period 
of "slashing" criticism, when it was the 
proper thing, unless an author could show 
good reason for being declared the greatest 
man of the age, to hang, draw, and quarter 
him on the spot. At about this time, Jef- 
frey of the "Edinburgh Review," a critic 
who made the most of his prerogative, 



28 WASHINGTON IRVING 

visited America. His coming was heralded 
by Irving' s friend Brevoort in a letter whose 
ludicrous climax is worth quoting : "It is 
essential that Jeffrey may imbibe a just es- 
timate of the United States and its inhabit- 
ants. . . . Persuade him to visit Washing- 
ton and by all means to see the falls of 
Niagara." Apparently Irving received the 
great Jeffrey with courtesy and composure ; 
as an equal, and not in the least as an idol 
to be propitiated with gewgaws. 

It was an anxious time, the year 1813. 
The struggle with England had assumed 
a more serious form. At last the British 
succeeded in entering Washington, and de- 
stroyed most of the public buildings. Ir- 
ving' s attitude had been uncompromisingly 
American from the outset. This act of van- 
dalism aroused his indignation ; he promptly 
offered his services to Governor Tompkins of 
New York, and was made an aide on his 
staff, with the brevet rank of colonel. This 
position he held for four months, when Gov- 
ernor Tompkins retired from the command. 
During that time Irving showed much ruili- 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 29 

tary zeal, and enough capacity to be ordered 
to the front at Sackett's Harbor, at an im- 
portant moment, with powers of which he 
made creditable use. 

In the spring of 1815 he narrowly es- 
caped sailing with Decatur on the expedition 
to Algiers. It was largely by his advice 
that Decatur decided to accept the command. 
Irving' s trunks had been taken on board the 
commodore's frigate when orders came from 
Washington delaying the expedition. Ir- 
ving was afraid that his presence might in 
some way embarrass the commander, and 
left the ship at once. He was not to be 
balked of Europe, however ; he was ready to 
sail and the affairs of the firm seemed to 
promise an easy competence. On May 25 
he embarked for Liverpool, with no very 
distinct plans, but with no expectation of 
being long abroad. It was seventeen years 
before he saw America again. 

He reached Liverpool at a dramatic mo- 
ment. Napoleon had fallen, and the mail 
coaches were rushing through England with 
the news of Waterloo. It was the sort of 



30 WASHINGTON IRVING 

pageant which always roused Irving's fancy. 
He was absorbed in the situation. 

His letters show that however he may 
have shrunk from concerning himself with 
practical politics, he viewed the great coups 
of statecraft with the greatest interest. His 
sympathies are with Bonaparte ; the English 
were perhaps too recent enemies to be treated 
quite charitably. " I have made a short visit 
to London," he wrote to one of his brothers 
in July. " The spirits of this nation, as you 
may suppose, are wonderfully elated by their 
successes on the Continent, and English 
pride is inflated to its full distention by the 
idea of having Paris at the mercy of Wel- 
lington and his army. The only thing that 
annoys the honest mob is that old Louis will 
not cut throats and lop off heads, and that 
Wellington will not blow up bridges and 
monuments, and plunder palaces and gal- 
leries. As to Bonaparte, they have disposed 
of him in a thousand ways ; every fat-sided 
John Bull has him dished up in a way to 
please his own palate, excepting that as yet 
they have not observed the first direction in 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 31 

the famous receipt to cook a turbot, — * First 
catchy our turbot.' " Then comes a post- 
script : " The bells are ringing, and this mo- 
ment news is brought that poor Boney is a 
prisoner at Plymouth. John has caught the 
turbot I " 

Peter Irving was in charge of the firm's 
English office at Liverpool. He was a bach- 
elor, and Irving had to go to Birmingham, 
to the house of his brother-in-law, Henry 
van Wart, to find an American home in 
England. But he did not make his perma- 
nent escape from Liverpool so easily. Not 
many months had passed before Peter fell 
ill, had to leave Liverpool, and Irving was 
left in charge. For over eight months the 
entire management of an ill-ordered estab- 
lishment fell into his hands. He seems to 
have made a thorough attempt to examine 
and arrange the confusions of the office. He 
studied bookkeeping, so that he might get 
some knowledge of the accounts, and other- 
wise busied himself in a methodical way for- 
eign to his habit. At last, in 1818, the 
best thing possible under the circumstances 



32 WASHINGTON IRVING 

happened, — the business collapsed, and the 
brothers found a road out of their difficul- 
ties by way of the bankruptcy court. It was 
a great relief. " For upwards of two years," 
he wrote to Brevoort, " I have been bowed 
down in spirit, and harassed by the most sor- 
did cares. As yet, I trust, my mind has not 
lost its elasticity, and I hope to recover some 
cheerful standing in the world. Indeed, I 
feel very little solicitude about my own pro- 
spects. I trust something will turn up to 
procure me subsistence, and am convinced, 
however scanty and precarious may be my 
lot, I can bring myself to be content. But 
I feel harassed in mind at times on behalf of 
my brothers. It is a dismal thing to look 
round on the wrecks of such a family con- 
nection. This is what, in spite of every 
exertion, will sometimes steep my soul in 
bitterness." 

Irving had now fairly arrived at maturity. 
The experience of the last few years had 
done much to sober him. He was still fond 
of society, and still of a cheerful temper; 
but the absorbing sophomoric joy in cakes 



MAN ABOUT TOWN 33 

and ale was now past and not to return. 
The pinch of necessity had come at last: the 
world no longer offered him the life of an 
elegant dawdler. He had a serious business 
before him, — to gain a competency for him- 
self and his brother. The unpractical younger 
brother was to be after this the mainstay of 
the family fortunes. And what especially 
makes this the finest moment of his life is 
the sudden and clear perception that to gain 
this end he must depend upon the steady and 
fruitful exercise of his gift for writing. It 
was not to be taken up as a last resort, but 
as a matter of deliberate choice. Presently 
he received the offer of a good position on the 
Navy Board at Washington, with a salary of 
12400. A few years earlier he would have 
snatched at it. " Flattering as the prospect 
undoubtedly is which your letters hold out," 
he wrote to his brother Ebenezer, " I have 
concluded to decline it for various reasons. . . . 
The principal one is, that I do not wish to 
undertake any situation that must involve 
me in such a routine of duties as to prevent 
my attending to literary pursuits." His de- 



34 WASHINGTON IRVING 

termination was sturdy enough, but lie was 
not then nor afterward the master of his 
moods. " I have heard him say," notes Pierre 
Irving, " that he was so disturbed by the 
responsibility he had taken in refusing such 
an offer and trusting to the imcertain chances 
of literary success, that for two months he 
could scarcely write a line." His elder 
brothers were heartily disappointed by the 
decision. They could not suppose that he 
would prove greatly more busy or fruitful in 
the future than he had in the past, and up 
to this time, he had done little enough. The 
youthful " Salmagundi " sketches, the broad 
satire of the Knickerbocker History were not 
much for a man of leisure to boast of at 
thirty-five. But they did not reckon justly 
with the new seriousness which had come 
into his purposes. Washington Irving was 
always fitful in his manner of working, often 
uncertain of himself and of his work. But 
from this time on he had no doubt of his 
calling ; he had ceased to be a man about 
town, and become a man of letters. 



Ill 

MAN OF LETTERS — FIRST PERIOD 

The appearance of the " Sketch Book," in 
1819, marks the beginning of Irving's pro- 
fessional life as a literary man. It was, 
moreover, the first original literary work of 
moment by an American. Two years later 
Bryant's first volume of poems was published, 
and Cooper's novels had begun to appear ; 
at this time Irving had the field to himself. 
Firm as his determination was to depend 
upon writing for support, he was by no 
means satisfied with what he was able to do. 
Even after the complete " Sketch Book " had 
appeared, and had been met with hearty ap- 
plause in England and America, he continued 
to be doubtful of its merits, and embarrassed 
by its reception. In sending the manuscript 
of the first number to America, he wrote to 
his brother Ebenezer : " I have sent the first 
number of a work which I hope to continue 



36 WASHINGTON IRVING 

from time to time. I send it more for the 
purpose of showing you what I am about, as 
I find my declining the situation at Wash- 
ington has given you chagrin. The fact is, 
that situation would have given me barely 
a genteeh subsistence. It would have led to 
no higher situations, for I am quite unfitted 
for political life. My talents are merely 
literary, and all my habits of thinking, read- 
ing, etc., have been in a different direction 
from that required by the active politician. 
It is a mistake also to suppose I would fill 
an office there, and devote myself at the 
same time to literature. I require much 
leisure, and a mind entirely abstracted from 
other cares and occupations, if I would write 
much or write well. ... If I ever get any 
solid credit with the public, it must be in 
the quiet and assiduous operations of my 
pen, under the mere guidance of fancy or 
feeling. ... I feel myself completely com- 
mitted in literary reputation by what I have 
already written ; and I feel by no means 
satisfied to rest my reputation on my preced- 
ing writings. I have suffered several precious 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 37 

years of youth and lively imagination to pass 
by unimproved, and it behooves me to make 
the most of what is left. If I indeed have the 
means within me of establishing a legitimate 
literary reputation, this is the very period 
of life most auspicious for it, and I am re- 
solved to devote a few years exclusively to the 
attempt. ... In fact, I consider myself at 
present as making a literary experiment, in 
the course of which I only care to be kept 
in bread and cheese. Should it not succeed 
— should my writings not acquire critical 
applause, I am content to throw up the pen 
and take to any commonplace employment. 
But if they should succeed, it would repay 
me for a world of care and privation to be 
placed among the established authors of my 
country, and to win the affections of my 
countrymen. . . . Do not, I beseech you, im- 
pute my lingering in Europe to any indiffer- 
ence to my own country or my friends. . . . 
I am determined not to return home until I 
have sent some writings before me that shall, 
if they have merit, make me return to the 
smiles, rather than skulk back to the pity, 
of my friends." 



38 WASHINGTON IRVING 

To Brevoort he wrote at the same time : 
"I have attempted no lofty theme, nor 
sought to look wise and learned, which ap- 
pears to be very much the fashion among 
our American writers, at present. I have 
preferred addressing myself to the feeling 
and fancy of the reader, more than to his 
judgment. My writings, therefore, may ap- 
pear light and trifling in our country of 
philosophers and politicians ; but if they 
possess merit in the class of literature to 
which they belong, it is all to which I aspire 
in the work. I seek only to blow a flute 
accompaniment in the national concert, and 
leave others to play the fiddle and French 
horn." 

The favorable reception of the " Sketch 
Book " not only failed to remove his diffi- 
dence, but left him oppressed by a new sense 
of obligation to the public which had lauded 
his work. This feeling is expressed in a 
letter to Leslie, the painter, with whom he 
had become very intimate : "I am glad to 
find the second number pleases more than 
the first. The sale is very rapid, and, alto- 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 39 

gether, the success exceeds my most sanguine 
expectation. Now you suppose I am all on 
the alert, full of spirit and excitement. No 
such thing. I am just as good for nothing 
as ever I was ; and indeed I have been flur- 
ried and put out of my way by these puff- 
ings. I feel something as I suppose you 
did when your picture met with success — 
anxious to do something better, and at a loss 
what to do." 

Murray, who a little later was eager to 
publish anything from Irving's hand, de- 
clined to undertake the first English edition 
of the " Sketch Book." Irving was afraid of 
some incomplete pirated edition, and finally 
published the first number entirely at his 
own expense. Murray was glad enough to 
change his mind and bring out the later 
numbers. Among the many friends whom 
the young American had made in England 
was Walter Scott. A few days spent by 
Irving at Abbotsford had been enough to 
attach them strongly to each other. Scott 
had by no means outgrown his interest in 
the author of the " Knickerbocker History," 



40 WASHINGTON IRVING 

and Irving found nothing that was not 
delightful in the great romancer's character 
and way of life. " As to Scott," he wrote, 
" I cannot express my delight at his charac- 
ter and manners. He is a sterling, golden- 
hearted old worthy, full of the joyousness of 
youth, with an imagination continually fur- 
nishing forth pictures, and a charming sim- 
plicity of manner that puts you at ease with 
him in a moment. It has been a constant 
source of pleasure to me to remark his 
deportment towards his family, his neigh- 
bors, his domestics, his very dogs and cats ; 
everything that comes within his influence 
seems to catch a beam of that sunshine that 
plays round his heart." Now, while the 
prospects of the " Sketch Book " were still 
dubious, Scott offered him the editorship of 
an Anti-Jacobin magazine. Irving declined 
it, first on the ground of his dislike for poli- 
tico, and second on account of his irregular 
habits of mind. " My whole course of life 
has been desultory, and I am unfitted for 
any periodically recurring task, or any stipu- 
lated labor of body or mind. I have no 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 41 

command of my talents such as they are, 
and have to watch the varyings of my mind 
as I would a weathercock. Practice and 
training may bring me more into rule ; but 
at present I am as useless for regular service 
as one of my own country Indians or a Don 
Cossack." 

In August of this year, Irving and his 
brother Peter left England for the Conti- 
nent. They had got no farther than Havre 
when their fancy was taken with an appar- 
ent business opening for Peter, who had 
been idle since the failure of the firm. A 
steamboat had just been put upon the Seine, 
to run between Havre and Rouen. Peter 
should be a chief stockholder and director ; 
he and Washington would each put in 
$5000, and between Havre and Eouen the 
river would presently run gold for them. 
To be sure the money was yet to be found, 
but there were brothers William and Eben- 
ezer, who would no doubt be glad to help 
set that little golden river flowing. Unfor- 
tunately brothers William and Ebenezer did 
not approve of the scheme at all. They 



42 , WASHINGTON IRVING 

flatly refused to lend brother Peter $5000, 
or to honor brother Washington's drafts for 
the same amount. More unfortunately still, 
Irving had already committed himself. All 
of his literary property had to be disposed 
of, to provide the pledged amount, which was 
forthwith placed in the little steamboat on 
the Seine, and never heard of more. Peter 
was associated with the management, and 
kept busy, at least, for several years. This 
was the first of a long series of business 
ventures which made Irving's life uneasy. 
He would no sooner turn a few thousand by 
writing than he must sink it in this or that 
absolutely safe and immensely profitable 
enterprise. It was not for many years that 
he learned how certainly he might count 
upon disastrous results from such experi- 
ments. 

After the settlement of this affair, Irving 
took lodgings in Paris. Here he met Tom 
Moore, and in his house more than any- 
where else he became intimate. Moore's 
diary makes frequent mention of hini ; one 
of the most interesting entries records that 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 43 

Irving at this time wrote in ten days one 
hundred and thirty pages of the " Sketch 
Book " size. This was undoubtedly material 
for " Bracebridge Hall," the suggestion of 
which had come from Moore. In the mean- 
time the " Sketch Book " had continued to 
gain ground in England. Byron admired it 
greatly, and its popularity with the general 
public may be judged from the fact that it 
was commonly attributed to Scott. Irving 
described himself in a letter to Murray as 
leading " a * miscellaneous ' kind of life at 
Paris. . . . Anacreon Moore is living here, 
and has made me a gayer fellow than I 
could have wished ; but I found it impossi- 
ble to resist the charm of his society." 

In July (1821) he returned to London, 
in poor physical condition. He had now 
been tormented at intervals for several years 
by an eruptive complaint which kept him 
from exercise, and brought on other troubles. 
After his return he was bedridden for four 
or five months, most of which he passed at 
his sister's house in Birmingham. He grew 
very fond of his little nephews and nieces-— 



44 WASHINGTON IRVING 

particularly an urchin named George, of 
whom his letters record such items as : 
" George has made his appearance in a new 
pair of Grimaldi breeches, with pockets full 
as deep as the former. To balance his ball 
and marbles, he has the opposite pocket filled 
with a peg-top and a quantity of dry peas, 
so that he can only lie comfortably on his 
back or belly." He was by no means idle 
at this time. In January of the following 
year he sent the manuscript of " Bracebridge 
Hall " to his brother Ebenezer with the re- 
mark, " My health is still unrestored. This 
work has kept me from getting well, and 
my indisposition on the other hand has re- 
tarded the work. I have now been about 
five weeks in London, and have only once 
been out of doors, about a month since, and 
that made me worse." That single escape 
from the sick-room, his biographer says, was 
made for the sake of persuading Murray to 
publish Cooper's " Spy," which had already 
appeared in America. Irving' s own experi- 
ence was duplicated: Murray refused to 
take " The Spy," but was glad to publish 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 45 

Cooper's later work. He now gave Irving 
a thousand guineas for the English rights in 
" Bracebridge Hall." It was less than he 
might have given, but Irving could never be 
persuaded to haggle over prices. He seems to 
have agreed with Peter, who wrote cheerfully, 
" A thousand guineas has a golden sound." 
It was the amount which had been sunk in 
poor Peter's steamboat, which was still mak- 
ing its unprofitable trips up and down the 
Seine ; and two hilndred guineas of this 
thousand soon passed into his pocket, where 
no doubt he found their melody even plea- 
santer. 

" Bracebridge Hall " was well received ; 
and confirmed its author's reputation, espe- 
cially in England. He had only to be passive 
to find himself overwhelmed with social en- 
gagements. A more liberal diet and plenty of 
exercise had improved his condition, and for 
a month or so after getting rid of " Brace- 
bridge Hall," he gave himself up to the en- 
gagements of a London season. But his 
ankles soon began to trouble him again, and 
in July, 1822, he set out for Aix-la-Chapelle, 



46 WASHINGTON IRVING 

where lie hoped to get permanent relief from 
his distressing complaint. He found nothing 
to keep him long at Aix. The baths and 
waters were well enough, but he was too de- 
pendent upon cheerful companionship to en- 
dure life among a company of invalids. He 
began a leisurely round of the Continental 
watering-places, staying a few weeks here 
and a few days there, and gradually improv- 
ing in condition. Toward the close of the 
year he brought up at Dresden. 

The only touch of mystery which belongs 
to the story of Irving is connected with this 
six months' stay at Dresden. He made 
many friends there, and grew especially in- 
timate with an English family named Foster, 
a mother and two daughters. It is said — 
and denied — that he would have liked to 
marry the youngest daughter, Emily. His 
biographer insists that there was nothing in 
the affair but friendship. To Mrs. Foster 
he wrote the only account he ever gave of 
his early love and loss ; and his nephew 
quotes the closing passage as proof that he 
had no thought of marrying Emily Foster, 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 47 

however fond of her he may have been : 
" You wonder why I am not married. I have 
shown you why I was not long since. When 
I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I 
became involved in ruin. It was not for a 
man broken down in the world, to drag down 
any woman to his paltry circumstances. I 
was too proud to tolerate the idea of ever 
mending my circumstances by matrimony. 
My time has now gone by ; and I have grow- 
ing claims upon my thoughts and upon my 
means, slender and precarious as they are. 
I feel as if I had already a family to think 
and provide for." 

But this might be the modest speech of a 
middle-aged lover. Years later the written 
reminiscences of the two daughters unmis- 
takably impute the attentions of the brilliant 
American to something more than friendli- 
ness. It is certain that he had a very warm 
feeling for somebody or something in Dres- 
den, which led to a temporary return of his 
youthful delight in society. For his time 
was by no means given up to the Fosters. 
He was received into the life of the little 



48 WASHINGTON IRVING 

German court, and evidently derived such 
pleasure as is proper to a Republican from 
dancing with princesses, and acting in private 
theatricals with Highnesses and Excellencies. 
On the whole it seems to have been a peace- 
ful, idle, rather trivial time of sojourn among 
congenial people. He danced, he strolled, 
he wrote verses to little Miss Emily ; in short, 
he enjoyed himself as a youngish man may, 
whether the muse is waiting for him, or 
some less high-flown customer. " I wish I 
could give you a good account of my literary 
labors," he wrote his sister after several 
months in Dresden, " but I have nothing to 
report. I am merely seeing, and hearing, 
and my mind seems in too crowded and con- 
fused a state to produce anything. I am 
getting very familiar with the German lan- 
guage ; and there is a lady here who is so 
kind as to give me lessons every day in Ital- 
ian [Mrs. Foster], which language I have 
nearly forgotten, but which I am fast regain- 
ing. Another lady is superintending my 
French [Miss Emily Foster], so that if I 
am not acquiring ideas, I am at least acquir- 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 49 

ing a variety of modes of expressing them 
when they do come." Very likely the con- 
fusion of his mind was not lessened by the 
frequency of those French lessons. There 
really seems to be no reason for doubting 
the testimony of the elder sister's journal; 
" He has written. He has confessed to my 
mother, as to a dear and true friend, his love 

for E , and his conviction of its utter 

hopelessness. He feels himself unable to com- 
bat it. He thinks he must try, by absence, 
to bring more peace to his mind. . . . He has 
almost resolved to make a tour in Silesia, 
which will keep him absent for a few weeks." 
The tour in Silesia was certainly made ; and 
during the brief absence Irving wrote sundry 
sentimental letters to Mrs. Foster. There 
are occasions when he seems to imagine a 
pretty daughter looking over the admirable 
mother's shoulder, and being much affected 
by the famous author's tenderness for Dres- 
den. Presently he comes back to be their 
escort, for they are going home to England ; 
and at Kotterdam the good-bys are said. 
They met afterward in England, but the 
old intimacy was gone. 



50 WASHINGTON IRVING 

More than thirty years after, Irving had 
a letter from a Mrs. Emily Fuller, whose 
name he did not know. Pleasantly and dis- 
creetly it recalled those happy Emily Foster 
days in Dresden. " She addresses him be- 
cause she hopes that her eldest boy Henry 
may have the happiness and advantage of 
meeting him." Poor Irving ! Her eldest boy 
Henry. . . . Well, the sting was all gone by 
that time, fortunately. His reply is all that 
it ought to be, and nothing more. 

Those first days in Paris were not cheer- 
ful ones for Irving. His pleasant dream was 
over, and he had forgotten what to do with 
waking moments. His memorandum-book 
records that he felt oppressed by " a strange 
horror on his mind — a dread of future evil 
— of failure in future literary attempts — a 
dismal foreboding that he could not drive off 
by any effort of reason." " When I once 
get going again with my pen," he wrote to 
Peter, " I mean to keep on steadily, until I 
can scrape together enough to produce a 
regular income, however moderate. We 
shall then be independent of the world and 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 51 

its chances." But he could not manage to 
get going. For some time he could write 
nothing at all. Fortunately, after an un- 
profitable month or two, he fell in with 
John Howard Payne, now remembered only 
for his " Home, Sweet Home," but then 
esteemed as an actor and dramatist. Irving 
had met him several years before, and now 
became associated with him in some dra- 
matic translating and adapting. The results 
were nearly worthless from a literary point 
of view, but served to keep him busy, and to 
put him once more in the writing vein. 

For some time Murray had been pressing 
him hard for copy, and in the spring of 1824 
the "Tales of a Traveler" were completed 
and sent to press. After the task of proof- 
reading came a reaction of high spirits which 
expressed itself in the most amusing letter 
Irving ever wrote : — 

" Brighton, August 14, 1824. 
" My boat is on the shore, 
And my bark is on the sea. 

" I forget how the song ends, but here I am 
at Brighton just on the point of embarking 



52 WASHINGTON IRVING 

for France. I have dragged myself out of 
London, as a horse drags himself out of the 
slough, or a fly out of a honey-pot, almost 
leaving a limb behind him at every tug. 
Not that I have been immersed in pleasure 
and surrounded by sweets, but rather up to 
the ears in ink and harassed by printers' 
devils. 

" I never have had such fagging in alter- 
ing, adding, and correcting ; and I have been 
detained beyond all patience by the delays 
of the press. Yesterday I absolutely broke 
away, without waiting for the last sheets. 
They are to be sent after me here by mail, 
to be corrected this morning, or else they 
must take their chance. From the time I 
first started pen in hand on this work, it has 
been nothing but hard driving with me. 

" I have not been able to get to Tunbridge 
to see the Donegals, which I really and 
greatly regret. Indeed I have seen nobody 
except a friend or two who had the kindness 
to hunt me out. Among these was Mr. 
Story, and I ate a dinner there that it took 
me a week to digest, having been obliged to 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 53 

swallow so much hard-favored nonsense from 
a loud-talking baronet whose name, thank 
God, I forget, but who maintained Byron 
was not a man of courage, and therefore his 
poetry was not readable. I was really afraid 
he would bring John Story to the same way 
of thinking. 

" I went a few evenings since to see Ken- 
ney's new piece, the Alcaid. It went off 
lamely, and the Alcaid is rather a bore, and 
comes near to be generally thought so. Poor 
Kenney came to my room next evening, and 
I could not believe that one night could have 
ruined a man so completely. I swear to you 
I thought at first it was a flimsy suit of 
clothes had left some bedside and walked 
into my room without waiting for the owner 
to get up ; or that it was one of those frames 
on which clothiers stretch coats at their shop 
doors ; until I perceived a thin face sticking 
edgeways out of the collar of the coat like 
the axe in a bundle of fasces. He was so 
thin, and pale, and nervous, and exhausted 
— he made a dozen difficulties in getting 
over a spot in the carpet, and never would 



54 WASHINGTON IRVING 

have accomplished it if he had not lifted 
himself over by the points in his shirt-collar. 

" I saw Rogers just as I was leaving town. 
I had not time to ask him any particulars 
about you, and indeed he is not exactly the 
man from whom I would ask news about my 
friends. I dined tete-a-tete with him some 
time ago, and he served up his friends as he 
served up his fish, with a squeeze of lemon 
over each. It was very piquant, but it 
rather set my teeth on edge. . . . 

" Farewell, my dear Moore. Let me hear 
from you, if but a line ; particularly if my 
work pleases you, but don't say a word 
against it. 1 am easily put out of humor 
with what I do." 

Surely no more delicious bit of nonsense 
was ever written than the description of poor 
Kenney. Moore read it to a group of friends 
in the presence of the victim — a situation 
which would have been too " piquant " for 
Irving's taste. 

Moore had only the desired praise for the 
" Tales of a Traveler," but elsewhere it did not 
fare so well. Irving considered it on the 



MAN OF LETTERS — FIRST PERIOD 55 

whole his best work ; but though it had a 
large sale, its reception in England was 
not quite what he had hoped for ; and in 
America it was received by the press with 
something like hostility. Unfortunately 
some busybody in America made it his con- 
cern to forward to Irving all the ill-natured 
flings which could be gleaned from Ameri- 
can notices of the new book. The incident 
— with all its unpleasantness — was trifling 
enough, but to Irving' s raw sensitiveness it 
was torture. He was overwhelmed with an 
almost ludicrous melancholy, could not write, 
could not sleep, could not bear to be alone. 
This petty outburst of critical spleen, backed 
as it evidently was by personal antagonism 
on the part of a few obscure journalists, actu- 
ally left him dumb for more than a year. 

Of course the public was right in its gen- 
eral estimate of the " Tales of a Traveler " : 
they are not as good as the " Sketch Book." 
In kind they are similar — that in itself 
would be enough to excite prejudice against 
new work from an author who had been so 
long before the public; but they are also 



56 WASHINGTON IRVING 

undeniably inferior in quality. One or two 
of the stories are distinctly morbid in tone, 
several give the impression of being long 
drawn out. In some way the collection 
lacks atmosphere ; Italian scenery is painted 
with accuracy, but not Italian life or charac- 
ter. Irving could draw the early Dutch in 
America, or the mediaeval Moors in Spain, 
or the Englishman in England or Italy : the 
modern Italian on his own soil he did not 
know except in his melodramatic exterior. 

Irving had now given his brother Peter 
a place in his little menage. The steam- 
boat scheme had failed utterly, and he had 
from this time on no sort of regular employ- 
ment. Irving set himself cheerfully to pro- 
vide for both. His goal at this time was 
less fame than fortune — " by every exertion 
to attain sufficient to make us both independ- 
ent for the rest of our lives." Not for many 
years did he come to perceive that a life of 
leisure was not only impossible, but undesir- 
able for him, and to express it as his fondest 
wish that he might " die in harness." The 
profits of the " Tales of a Traveler " went the 



MAN OF LETTERS-FIRST PERIOD 57 

way of most of his earnings — this time to 
help develop a Bolivia copper mine. 

He had been studying Spanish for a year 
or two, and had an increased desire to see 
Spain. As a mere aid in traveling, he asked 
for the nominal post of attache to the Amer- 
ican legation at Madrid. Alexander H. 
Everett, then minister to Spain, at once 
granted the request, and in replying sug- 
gested a possible literary task — the trans- 
lation of a new Spanish work, Navarrete's 
" Voyages of Columbus," which was shortly to 
make its appearance. Murray, who was 
then in some difficulties, did not think favor- 
ably of the project. 

Irving went to Madrid, and by good for- 
tune got lodgings with the American consul 
Rich, who had made an extensive private 
collection of documents dealing with early 
American history. Presently Navarrete's 
work was published, and found to be " rather 
a mass of rich materials for history than a 
history itself." This was in February, 1826. 
Irving at once began to take notes and sift 
materials for an original history of Colum- 



58 WASHINGTON IRVING 

bus. For six months he worked incessantly. 
" Sometimes," says his biographer, " he 
would write all day and until twelve at 
night ; in one instance his note-book shows 
him to have written from five in the morn- 
ing until eight at night, stopping only for 
meals." 



IV 

MAN OF LETTERS — SECOND PERIOD 

There is something interesting, and in a 
sense pathetic, in this sudden steady dili- 
gence from the man of desultory habits, who 
had never written but by whim, whose fin- 
ger had always been lifted to catch the 
lightest literary airs. Here, at last, was the 
firm trade wind, and the satisfaction of 
steady and methodical progress. The qual- 
ified success of the " Tales of a Traveler " had 
led him to feel that his vein was running 
out. The prospect of producing a solid work 
gave him keen pleasure. One cannot be al- 
ways building castles in the air ; why not 
try a pyramid, if only a little one ? Since 
the world is perfectly delighted with our 
pretty things, very well, let us show that we 
can do a sublime thing. As for history — 
" Whatever may be the use of this sort of 
composition in itself and abstractedly," says 



60 WASHINGTON IRVING 

Walter Bagehot, " it is certainly of great use 
relatively and to literary men. Consider the 
position of a man of that species. He sits 
beside a library fire, with nice white paper, 
a good pen, a capital style — every means 
of saying everything, but nothing to say. 
Of course he is an able man ; of course he 
has an active intellect, besides wonderful cul- 
ture : but still, one cannot always have origi-. 
nal ideas. Every day cannot be an era ; a 
train of new speculation very often will not 
be found : and how dull it is to make it your 
business to write, to stay by yourself in a 
room to write, and then to have nothing to 
say ! It is dreary work mending seven pens, 
and waiting for a theory to ' turn up.' What 
a gain if something would happen ! then one 
could describe it. Something has happened, 
and that something is history." 

There is no doubt that Irving's early del- 
icate sallies in literature represent his best. 
In a single department of belles-lettres he 
had shown mastery. During the remainder 
of his life he continued to work at intervals 
in that field with similar felicity ; and, for 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 61 

the rest, to write amiably and respectably 
upon many topics foreign to his natural 
bent. But his greatest work was done in 
odd moments and at a heat ; all the method 
in the world could not increase his real stat- 
ure by a cubit. 

A word may perhaps be said here of 
Irving as an historian and biographer. Of 
course he could not write dully; his his- 
tories are just as readable as Goldsmith's, 
and rather more veracious. But he plainly 
had not the scholar's training and methods 
which we now demand of the historian ; nor 
had he the larger view of men and events 
in their perspective. Generalization was 
beyond him. Fortunately to generalize is 
only a part of the business of the historian. 
To catch some dim historic figure, and give 
it life and color, — this power he had. And 
it was evidently this which gave him the 
praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft 
and Motley. Washington had begun to 
loom vaguely and impersonally in the mind, 
a mere great man, when Irving with a touch 
turned him from cold bronze into flesh and 
blood again. 



62 WASHINGTON IRVING 

During the years of Irving's stay abroad 
other American writers had come into notice. 
Bryant's poetry had become well known. 
Cooper had produced " The Spy," " The Pi- 
lot," "The Pioneers," and " The Last of the 
Mohicans." In 1827 appeared the first 
volume of poems by Edgar Allan Poe. In 
this year, too, Irving's diary records a meet- 
ing with Longfellow, who was then twenty- 
one, and came abroad to prepare himself for 
his professorship at Bowdoin. Longfellow's 
recollection of the incident is worth quoting: 
" I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Irving 
in Spain, and found the author, whom I had 
loved, repeated in the man. The same 
playful humor ; the same touches of senti- 
ment ; the same poetic atmosphere ; and, 
what I admired still more, the entire ab- 
sence of all literary jealousy, of all that 
mean avarice of fame, which counts what is 
given to another as so much taken from 
one's self — 

" c And trembling, hears in every breeze 
The laurels of Miltiades.' " 

In the following summer the " History of 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 63 

Columbus " was finished, and sold to Mur- 
ray. It won high praise from the reviewers, 
especially from Alexander H. Everett, his 
former diplomatic chief, and at this time 
editor of the " North American Review." 

Early in the following year he made his 
first visit to Andalusian Spain. In the 
course of his grubbing among the Columbus 
archives, he had found a good deal of inter- 
esting material about the Moorish occu- 
pancy. The beauty of the country and the 
grandeur of its Moorish relics took strong 
hold upon him. In April, 1828, he settled 
in Seville, and there the " Chronicles of the 
Conquest of Granada " were written. By 
this time the market price of his wares had 
gone up very much. There is no doubt that 
his historical work had increased his tem- 
porary reputation. Murray gave him 2000 
guineas for the " Conquest of Granada ; " he 
further offered him .£1000 a year to edit a 
new literary and scientific magazine, as well 
as .£100 an article for any contribution he 
might choose to make to the " London Quar- 
terly." He refused the first offer on the 



64 WASHINGTON IRVING 

ground that lie did not care to be tied in 
England, the second because the " Quar- 
terly " had always been hostile to America. 
He continued to take an interest in affairs 
at home. Impatient as he was of political 
methods, he had opinions of his own as to 
candidates and measures. The election of 
Jackson called forth the following comment 
in a letter to Mr. Everett : "I was rather 
sorry when Mr. Adams was first raised to 
the presidency, but I am much more so at 
his being displaced ; for he has made a 
far better president than I expected, and I 
am loth to see a man superseded who has 
filled his station worthily. These frequent 
changes in our administration are prejudi- 
cial to the country; we ought to be wary 
of using our power of changing our chief 
magistrate when the welfare of the country 
does not require it. In the present elec- 
tion there has, doubtless, been much honest, 
warm, grateful feeling toward Jackson, but 
I fear much pique, passion, and caprice as it 
respects Mr. Adams. 

" Since the old general was to be the man, 



MAN OF LETTERS— SECOND PERIOD 65 

however, I am well pleased upon the whole 
that he has a great majority, as it will, for 
the reasons you mention, produce a political 
calm in the country, and lull those angry 
passions which have been exasperated dur- 
ing the Adams administration, by the close 
contest of nearly balanced parties. As to 
the old general, with all his hickory charac- 
teristics, I suspect he has good stuff in him, 
and will make a sagacious, independent, and 
high-spirited president; and I doubt his 
making so high-handed a one as many im- 
agine." 

The " Chronicles of the Conquest of Gra- 
nada " were well treated by critics, but never 
very popular. The humor of the mythical 
Fray Antonio's narrative was too sly and 
covert ; the public was mystified, and had 
half a notion it was being made game of. 
But Irving was not yet done with Granada. 
Presently he went back, and in the course 
of a solitary two months in the Alhambra, 
got together the materials for the most char- 
acteristic work he had published since the 
" Tales of a Traveler " and the strongest 



66 WASHINGTON IRVING 

since the " Sketch Book." His idyllic stay- 
in the Alhambra was one of the pleasantest 
episodes of his life. When it was cut short 
by his appointment as secretary of legation 
at London, he made up his mind to leave 
the quiet breathing-spot with real regret. 
One cannot help seeing from the tone of his 
letter to Peter that the years have given him 
as much as they have taken away : " My 
only horror is the bustle and turmoil of the 
world : how shall I stand it after the de- 
licious quiet and repose of the Alhambra? 
I had intended, however, to quit this place be- 
fore long, and, indeed, was almost reproach- 
ing myself for protracting my sojourn, hav- 
ing little better than sheer self-indulgence 
to plead for it ; for the effect of the climate, 
the air, the serenity and sweetness of the 
place, is almost as seductive as that of the 
Castle of Indolence, and I feel at times an 
impossibility of working, or of doing any- 
thing but yielding to a mere voluptuousness 
of sensation." 

At London he found himself associated 
with congenial men, but tied so closely to 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 67 

the legation that he could not even get away 
to visit his sister at Birmingham. The con- 
straint chafed him at first, but before long 
his letters show him reconciled, and even 
interested in the practical business of di- 
plomacy. They complain, however, of his 
growing stout. This, indeed, he had a per- 
fect right to do. He was now forty-seven 
years old, and a man of solid reputation ; 
weighty honors were being heaped upon 
him. Before leaving Spain he had been 
made a member of the Spanish Eoyal Acad- 
emy of History ; and in England he had 
just received a medal from the Royal Society 
of Literature, and the degree of LL. D. 
from Oxford. His leisure for literary work 
was not great in London, but he was making 
some progress with the Alhambra stories, 
and had begun to think seriously of the 
" Life of Washington," which was to hold 
the main place in his thoughts for the rest 
of his life. 

At this time England was suffering under 
the double discomfort of cholera and the 
Reform Bill. A letter from Irving to his 



68 WASHINGTON IRVING 

brother shows that even in the midst of his 
successes the popular author was subject to 
moods of mental gloom, and even to busi- 
ness difficulties : " The restlessness and un- 
certainty in which I have been kept have 
disordered my mind and feelings too much 
for imaginative writing, and I now doubt 
whether I could get the Alhambra ready in 
time for Christmas. . . . The present state 
of things here completely discourages the 
idea of publication of any kind. There is 
no knowing who among the booksellers is 
safe. Those who have published most are 
worst off, for in this time of public excite- 
ment nobody reads books or buys them." 

In 1831, Van Bur en was nominated as 
Minister to the Court of St. James, and at 
once took charge of his diplomatic duties. 
His nomination was rejected by the Senate, 
however ; and Irving determined to take 
advantage of the incident to make his own 
escape from the service, and return at last 
to America. 

In May, 1831, he arrived in New York. 
He had been a young man when he left 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD G9 

America; he was now leaning toward the 
farther verge of his prime. In*character he 
had refined and sobered greatly ; and he had 
more than fulfilled his promise of literary 
excellence. He had still twenty-six years to 
live, and was to do much useful service in 
life and letters ; but he could do nothing in 
that time to alter his reputation ; he could 
merely confirm it. Irving had grown im- 
mensely, too, in the favor of his countrymen. 
He was welcomed back with extravagant 
effusion by his old friends and by the coun- 
try at large. He had in fact come to be re- 
garded as one of the chief glories of Amer- 
ica ; for he had been the first to make her a 
world-power in literature. 

During those seventeen years New York 
had changed almost beyond recognition in 
size, in appearance, in the tone of its life ; 
but Irving was delighted with everything 
and everybody. All that he had to regret 
was the ordeal of a great public dinner in 
his honor, at which, after a great deal of 
preliminary nervousness, he made the one 
speech of his life. It was a good speech, but 



70 WASHINGTON IRVING 

lie could never be prevailed upon to repeat 
the experiment. He was always at his worst 
in a large company. The sight of a great 
number of unknown or half-known faces 
confused his thoughts and clogged his tongue. 
His intimates knew him for a brilliant and 
ready talker, full of easy fun and unaffected 
sentiment. 

Not long after his return, the " Tales of 
the Alhambra" were published. In the 
somewhat florid concert of critical praises 
which greeted the book, a simple theme is 
dominant. Everybody felt that in these 
stories Irving had come back to his own. 
The material was very different from that of 
the " Sketch Book," yet it yielded to similar 
treatment. The grace, romance, humor, of 
this "beautiful Spanish Sketch Book," as 
the historian Prescott called it, appealed at 
once to an audience which had listened some- 
what coldly to the less spontaneous "Tales 
of a Traveler," and had given a formal ap- 
probation to the " History of Columbus," 
without finding very much Irving in it. 

A visit to Washington to clear up various 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 71 

odds and ends of his diplomatic experience 
resulted in an interview with President 
Jackson, which he reported in a letter to 
Peter Irving, now living alone in Paris : " I 
have been most kindly received by the old 
general, with whom I am much pleased as 
well as amused. As his admirers say, he is 
truly an old Roman — to which I could add, 
with a little dash of the Greek ; for I sus- 
pect he is as knowing as I believe he is hon- 
est. I took care to put myself promptly on 
a fair and independent footing with him; 
for, in expressing warmly and sincerely how 
much I had been gratified by the unsought 
but most seasonable mark of confidence he 
had shown me, when he hinted something 
about a disposition to place me elsewhere, I 
let him know emphatically that I wished for 
nothing more — that my whole desire was 
to live among my countrymen, and to follow 
my usual pursuits. In fact, I am persuaded 
that my true course is to be master of my- 
self and of my time. Official station can- 
not add to my happiness or respectability, 
and certainly would stand in the way of my 



72 WASHINGTON IRVING 

literary career." This disinclination to take 
office he never got over, although he was 
frequently approached with offers of place. 
In 1834, he was offered a nomination for 
Congress by the Jackson party; in 1838, he 
was offered the Tammany nomination as 
mayor of New York, and the secretaryship 
of the navy by Van Buren. And when 
three years later he was given a still more 
important post, it was only the evident spon- 
taneity of the choice, and the feeling that in 
taking the office he should be representing 
country rather than party, which led him to 
accept it. 

Impatient as he was of political methods, 
he had opinions of his own on specific ques- 
tions, and a broad political platform which 
he once stated in a letter to his old friend 
Kemble : — 

" As far as I know my own mind, I am 
thoroughly a republican, and attached, from 
complete conviction, to the institutions of 
my country ; but I am a republican with- 
out gall, and have no bitterness in my creed. 
I have no relish for puritans either in reli- 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 73 

gion or politics, who are for pushing princi- 
ples to an extreme, and for overturning 
everything that stands in the way of their 
own zealous career. I have, therefore, felt 
a strong distaste for some of those loco-foco 
luminaries who of late have been urging 
strong and sweeping measures, subversive 
of the interests of great classes of the com- 
munity. Their doctrines may be excellent 
in theory, but, if enforced in violent and un- 
compromising opposition to all our habitudes, 
may produce the most distressing effects. 
The best of remedies must be cautiously ap- 
plied, and suited to the state and constitu- 
tion of the patient ; otherwise, what is in- 
tended to cure, may produce convulsion. 
The late elections have shown that the mea- 
sures proposed by Government are repug- 
nant to the feelings and habitudes or disas- 
trous to the interests of great portions of our 
fellow citizens. They should not, then, be 
forced home with rigor. Ours is a govern- 
ment of compromise. We have several great 
and distinct interests bound up together, 
which, if not separately consulted and sev- 



74 WASHINGTON IRVING 

erally accommodated, may harass and im- 
pair each other. A stern, inflexible, and 
uniform policy may do for a small compact 
republic, like one of those of ancient Greece, 
where there is a unity of character, habits, 
and interests ; but a more accommodating, 
discriminating, and variable policy must be 
observed in a vast republic like ours, formed 
of a variety of states widely differing in 
habits, pursuits, characters, and climes, and 
banded together by a few general ties. 

" I always distrust the soundness of politi- 
cal councils that are accompanied by acri- 
monious and disparaging attacks upon any 
great class of our fellow citizens. Such are 
those urged to the disadvantage of the great 
trading and financial classes of our country. 
You yourself know, from education and ex- 
perience, how important these classes are to 
the prosperous conduct of the complicated 
affairs of this immense empire. You your- 
self know, in spite of all the commonplace 
cant and obloquy that has been cast upon 
them by political spouters and scribblers, 
what general good faith and fair dealing 
prevails throughout these classes." 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 75 

At this time he was studying with in- 
creasing interest the shifting spectacle of 
American life. The openings of the West 
especially caught his imagination, and when 
the chance came to travel on what was then 
the frontier, the trans-Mississippi territo- 
ries, he was quick to accept it. As guest of 
one of the members of a commission ap- 
pointed to treat with several Indian tribes, 
he went as far as Fort Gibson on the Ark- 
ansas. The literary fruits of this journey 
were " A Tour on the Prairies," and " The 
Adventures of Captain Bonneville." 

In April, 1833, he bought the little es- 
tate of Sunnyside, near the Sleepy Hollow 
which he had made famous. His first name 
for it was « The Koost " (Dutch for 
"Rest"), which he changed for reasons 
which are not recorded ; possibly the little 
nieces who became regular inmates may have 
thought the old name not dignified enough. 
This he regarded as his home for the rest of 
his life. He set to work at once to enlarge 
the old Dutch stone cottage which stood 
upon the place ; and from this time on he is 



76 WASHINGTON IRVING 

continually " puttering " about the estate, 
building a poultry-yard here, planting trees 
there, with the full zeal of the rural land- 
lord. His family letters are given to ac- 
counts of little country doings : " The goose 
war is happily terminated : Mr. Jones' 
squadron has left my waters, and my feath- 
ered navy now plows the Tappan Sea in 
triumph. I cannot but attribute this great 
victory to the valor and good conduct of the 
enterprising little duck, who seems to enjoy 
great power and popularity among both 
geese and ganders, and absolutely to be the 
master of the fleet. ... I am happy to in- 
form you that, among the many other bless- 
ings brought to the cottage by the good Mr. 
Lawrence is a pig of first-rate stock and 
lineage. It has been duly put in possession 
of the palace in the rear of the barn, where 
it is shown to every visitor with as much 
pride as if it was the youngest child of a 
family. As it is of the fair sex, and in the 
opinion of the best judges a pig of peerless 
beauty, I have named it « Fanny.' I know it 
is a name which with Kate and you has a 



MAN OF LETTERS— SECOND PERIOD 77 

romantic charm, and about the cottage every- 
thing, as old Mrs. Marthing says, must be 
romance." This was during the vogue of 
Fanny Kemble. 

In this quiet retreat the next five unevent- 
ful years were passed, with occasional ex- 
cursions to New York or farther, which only 
served to make the seclusion of the country 
home more inviting. Peter Irving spent 
his last days at the Roost ; and Ebenezer 
Irving and his family gave up their New 
York house to make their home with the 
now famous brother. While this arrange- 
ment greatly increased Irving's satisfaction 
in life, it made heavy demands upon his 
purse. One cannot be a country gentleman 
for nothing. The cottage had to be enlarged 
repeatedly, the grounds cared for ; and the 
mere running expenses were a considerable 
matter for a man without dependable income. 
Irving had by this time received a great deal 
of money for his books, but an unfortunate 
" knack of hoping " had locked up most of 
it in unprofitable land speculations. 

In 1835 the three volumes of the " Crayon 



78 WASHINGTON IRVING 

Miscellanies," were published. The " Tour 
on the Prairies " was especially palatable 
to Americans. Edward Everett said of it, 
in the highly colored style of the period : 
" We are proud of Mr. Irving's sketches of 
English life, proud of the gorgeous canvas 
upon which he has gathered in so much of 
the glowing imagery of Moorish times. We 
behold with delight his easy and triumphant 
march over these beaten fields ; but we glow 
with rapture as we see him coming back, 
laden with the poetical treasures of the 
primitive wilderness, rich with spoil from the 
uninhabited desert." 

The second volume, containing " Abbots- 
ford " and " Newstead Abbey," naturally 
gained special praise in England ; the third, 
"Legends of the Conquest of Spain," had 
comparatively little success. 

Of " Astoria " (1836) it is hard to know 
what to say ; on the whole, it seems the 
most doubtful of his works in motive and 
quality. John Jacob Astor, now an old 
man, was anxious to perpetuate the fame of 
his commercial exploits, and was lucky 



MAN OF LETTERS-SECOND PERIOD 79 

enough to subsidize for this purpose the 
most prominent American writer of the 
day. The adventures of the various ex- 
peditions sent out to found an American 
trading company on the Pacific coast are 
interesting; but one puts down Irving's 
account of them with the feeling that it re- 
flects rather more credit on Mr. Astor than 
on the writer. The truth is, Irving, like 
many less successful literary men, was con- 
stantly in need of money ; and he had begun 
to be in some difficulty for subjects upon 
which to exercise his craft. The " Adventures 
of Captain Bonneville" (1837) was also a 
piece of skillful book-making rather than an 
original creative work ; and after that nearly 
two years passed without his writing any- 
thing. 

At last, toward the close of 1838, he hit 
upon a subject which attracted him greatly 
— a " History of the Conquest of Mexico." 
He began at once upon preliminary studies, 
and had made considerable progress when 
he learned by chance that Prescott, who had 
recently made a name for himself by his 



80 WASHINGTON IRVING 

" Ferdinand and Isabella," was at work upon 
the same subject. Irving immediately retired 
from the field, and conveyed a courteous 
assurance to Prescott of his satisfaction in 
leaving the theme to such hands. He felt 
this sacrifice keenly, however ; the project had 
appealed to him peculiarly, and he had no 
other in mind to take its place. For lack 
of other literary work, therefore, he presently 
engaged to write a monthly article for the 
New York "Knickerbocker," at a salary 
of $2000 a year. The arrangement was 
just not too irksome to continue for two 
years. 

It is easy to see, then, that at fifty-five 
Irving was pretty well written out. In the 
twenty years that remained to him he pro- 
duced nothing of account except the " Life of 
Washington," which, like his other works in 
biography and history, may be regarded as 
a tour de force rather than a spontaneous 
outcome of his genius. 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 

The data of Irving's literary achievements 
have been brought near a conclusion ; what 
remains to be said may now deal less with 
what he wrote, and more with what he did 
and was. It is luckily unnecessary to try 
for a sharply drawn distinction between his 
popularity as a writer and as a man. In his 
home, in society, and in literature the single 
charm of his personality had made him be- 
loved in the same way. And he had become, 
in the best sense of the term, a public char- 
acter. For many years his name had been 
better known abroad than that of any other 
living American ; and his reception at home 
after an absence of seventeen years showed 
in what regard his countrymen had come to 
hold him. Their pride in his success and 
gratitude for the new fame he had given a 
country which was still felt to be on proba- 



82 WASHINGTON IRVING 

tion, can hardly account for it ; only the 
confidence of affection could have excused so 
prolonged an absenteeism. 

His peculiar hold upon popular affection 
cannot be better suggested than by the tone 
of a letter written by the only Englishman 
who during Irving's life could pretend to 
rival him in his peculiar field. In 1841, 
Irving wrote to Dickens, expressing pleasure 
in his work. Dickens replied : " There is no 
man in the world who could have given me 
the heartfelt pleasure you have, by your kind 
note of the 13th of last month. There is no 
living writer, and there are very few among 
the dead, whose approbation I should feel so 
proud to earn. And with everything you 
have written upon my shelves, and in my 
thoughts, and in my heart of hearts, I may 
honestly and truly say so. ... I wish I 
could find in your welcome letter some hint 
of an intention to visit England. I can't. 
I have held it at arm's length, and taken a 
bird's eye view of it, after reading it a great 
many times, but there is no greater encour- 
agement in it this way than on a microscopic 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 83 

inspection. I should love to go with you — 
as I have gone, God knows how often — 
into Little Britain, and Eastcheap, and Green 
Arbor Court, and Westminster Abbey. I 
should like to travel with you, outside the 
last of the coaches, down to Bracebridge 
Hall. It would make my heart glad to com- 
pare notes with you about that shabby gen- 
tleman in the oilcloth hat and red nose, 
who sat in the nine-cornered back parlor 
of the Masons' Arms ; and about Kobert 
Preston, and the tallow chandler's widow, 
whose sitting-room is second nature to me ; 
and about all those delightful places and peo- 
ple that I used to walk about and dream of 
in the daytime, when a very small and not 
over-particularly-taken-care-of boy. I have 
a good deal to say, too, about that dashing 
Alonzo de Ojeda, that you can't help being 
fonder of than you ought to be ; and much 
to hear concerning Moorish legend and poor, 
unhappy Boabdil. Diedrich Knickerbocker 
I have worn to death in my pocket, and yet 
I should show you his mutilated carcass 
with a joy past all expression." 



84 WASHINGTON IRVING 

Not long afterward Dickens visited Amer- 
ica. Irving and he saw much of each other, 
though they did not meet many times. Ir- 
ving presided at a great dinner given to Boz 
in New York, broke down in his introduc- 
tory speech, and otherwise endeared himself 
to his brother author. When presently 
Dickens went back, he wrote, " I did not 
come to see you, for I really have not the 
heart to say ' good-by ' again, and felt more 
than I can tell you when we shook hands 
last Wednesday." 

Pretty soon Irving himself was leaving 
America. In February, 1842, he was 
startled from the home quiet of Sunnyside 
by a summons which he could not disregard. 
Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, 
had secured his appointment as Minister to 
Spain. The Senate confirmed it almost by 
acclamation, and letters came from various 
quarters urging him to accept it. He could 
not doubt that the wish was general. But 
it was very hard for him to leave home 
and America again. For some time after 
accepting the post he was plunged into a 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 85 

dejection which seemed laughable to him- 
self. " The crowning honor of his life," he 
admitted, had come to him, and he could 
only groan under it. 

" ' It is hard, very hard/ he half murmured 
to himself, half to me ; yet he added whim- 
sically enough, being struck with the seem- 
ing absurdity of such a view, * I must try to 
bear it. God tempers the wind to the shorn 
lamb' " (P. M. Irving). 

In April he sailed from New York, and 
made a leisurely journey by way of England 
and France, not reaching Madrid till the 
end of July. Europe had lost its old charm. 
Many places reminded him painfully of the 
favorite brother Peter who had shared his 
first impressions of them, and whose loss was 
one of the keenest griefs of his life. " My 
visit to Europe has by no means the charm of 
former visits," he wrote from Paris ; " scenes 
and objects have no longer the effect of nov- 
elty with me. I am no longer curious to see 
great sights or great people, and have been 
so long accustomed to a life of quiet, that I 
find the turmoil of the world becomes irk- 



86 WASHINGTON IRVING 

some to me. Then I have a house of my 
own, a little domestic world, created in a 
manner by my own hand, which I have left 
behind, and which is continually haunting 
my thoughts, and coming in contrast with the 
noisy, tumultuous, heartless world in which I 
am called to mingle. However, I am some- 
what of a philosopher, and can accommodate 
myself to changes, so I shall endeavor to re- 
sign myself to the splendor of courts and the 
conversation of courtiers, comforting myself 
with the thought that the time will come 
when I shall once more return to sweet little 
Sunnyside, and be able to sit on a stone 
fence, and talk about politics and rural af- 
fairs with Neighbor Forkel and Uncle 
Brom." 

At Madrid he very soon found himself 
too much occupied for the literary work he 
had counted on. He had accepted the place 
under the impression that his duties would 
not greatly interfere with the writing of the 
" Life of Washington," on which he was then 
fairly launched. But from the beginning 
he found the situation in Spain unexpect- 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 87 

edly absorbing. It was the usual Spanish 
situation, to be sure : a designing pretender, 
a child monarch, a court honeycombed with 
intrigue, and a people ready for anything 
spectacular. When Irving was presented 
to the young queen, she was closely guarded. 
" On ascending the grand staircase, we 
found the portal at the head of it, opening 
into the royal suite of apartments, still bear- 
ing the marks of the midnight attack upon 
the palace in October last, when an attempt 
was made to get possession of the persons 
of the little queen and her sister, to carry 
them off. . . . The marble casements of the 
doors had been shattered in several places, 
and the double doors themselves pierced all 
over with bullet-holes, from the musketry 
that played upon them from the staircase 
during that eventful night. What must 
have been the feelings of those poor chil- 
dren, on listening from their apartment to 
the horrid tumult, the outcries of a furious 
multitude, and the reports of fire-arms, echo- 
ing and reverberating through the vaulted 
halls and spacious courts of the immense 



88 WASHINGTON IRVING 

edifice, and dubious whether their own lives 
were not the object of the assault ! " Such 
an appeal to Irving's sympathy and chivalry 
was enough to deprive the situation of its 
quality of opera-bouffe. 

Presently an insurrection takes place in 
Barcelona. The regent hurries off to quell 
it, and Irving's letters are full of the pomp 
and circumstance of war. The regent is 
successful, and returns apparently firmer 
than ever in power. But a few months 
later the trouble breaks out again, more 
seriously; Madrid is placed in a state of 
siege, and martial law declared. The life of 
the queen is thought to be in danger, and 
the diplomatic corps, headed by Irving, 
offers its services for her protection. Fi- 
nally the regent is driven out of power, and 
blows are once again succeeded by intrigue. 
Such, briefly, was the character of the little 
drama in which the quiet American author 
was to take a significant part, during his 
whole ministry. This Spanish experience is 
fully recorded in his family letters. He 
was always a voluminous letter-writer ; dur- 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 89 

ing this period he is fairly encyclopedic. 
A single letter to his sister fills thirteen 
closely printed pages of his nephew's bio- 
graphy. His official dispatches, too, were 
very full and thorough. Webster valued 
them particularly, and remarked that he 
" always laid aside every other correspond- 
ence to read a diplomatic dispatch from 
Mr. Irving." He had time, too, for many 
charming chatty letters to the nieces at 
Sunnyside. Here is a Thackerayish pas- 
sage from one of them : " You seem to pity 
the poor little queen, shut up with her sister 
like two princesses in a fairy tale, in a 
great, grand, dreary palace, and wonder 
whether she would not like to change her 
situation for a nice little cottage on the 
Hudson ? Perhaps she would, Kate, if she 
knew anything of the gayeties of cottage 
life ; if she had ever been with us at a pic- 
nic, or driven out in the shandry-dan with 
the two roans, and James, in his slipshod 
hat, for a coachman, or yotted in the Dream, 
or sang in the Tarrytown choir, or shopped 
at Tommy Dean's; but, poor thing! she 



90 WASHINGTON IRVING 

would not know how to set about enjoying 
herself. She would not think of appearing 
at church without a whole train of the 

Miss s and the Miss s, and the 

Miss s, as maids of honor, nor drive 

through Sleepy Hollow except in a coach 
and six, with a cloud of dust, and a troop of 
horsemen in glittering armor. So I think, 
Kate, we must be content with pitying her, 
and leaving her in ignorance of the compar- 
ative desolateness of her situation." 

In 1842, Irving suffered another of those 
petty persecutions which he was not thick- 
skinned enough to endure without suffering, 
nor confident enough to ignore. The charges 
were of the most ordinary sort, and advanced 
by men of little weight : he had appropri- 
ated material without giving due credit for 
it, and he had puffed his own work. Their 
only claim upon our notice lies in the fact 
that Irving thought it worth while to con- 
fute them at length. He was perhaps es- 
pecially sensitive to critical attacks at this 
time. His income from literary property 
had nearly ceased. Some of his books were 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 91 

out of print, and the rest were having com- 
paratively little sale. A wave of indiffer- 
ence had overtaken his public. " Everything 
behind me seems to have turned to chaff and 
stubble," he wrote. " And if I desire any 
further profits from literature, it must be 
by the further exercise of my pen." It is 
characteristic of his modesty that he was 
disposed to accept this momentary neglect as 
final. He planned to revise all his works, 
in the hope of finding a renewed market for 
them later, but evidently expected little. 

A letter to Brevoort from Bordeaux dated 
November, 1843, accounts for the first break 
in his Madrid residence : "I am now on my 
way back to my post, after between two and 
three months , absence. I set out in pursuit 
of health, and thought a little traveling and 
a change of air would 'make me my own 
man again ' ; but I was laid by the heels at 
Paris by a recurrence of my malady, and 
have just escaped out of the doctor's hands. 
. . . This indisposition has been a sad check 
upon all my plans. I had hoped, by zeal- 
ous employment of all the leisure afforded 



92 WASHINGTON IRVING 

me at Madrid, to accomplish one or two lit- 
erary tasks which I have in hand. ... A 
year, however, has now been lost to me, and 
a precious year, at my time of life. The 
• Life of Washington,' and indeed all my 
literary tasks, have remained suspended ; 
and my pen has remained idle, excepting 
now and then in writing a dispatch to Gov- 
ernment, or scrawling a letter to my family. 
In the mean time the income which I used 
to derive from farming out my writings has 
died away, and my moneyed investments 
yield scarce any interest. . . . However, 
thank God, my health and with it my capa- 
city for work are returning. I shall soon 
again have pen in hand, and hope to get two 
or three good years of literary labor out of 
myself." 

After his return to Spain he was again 
laid by. He was disappointed, but not 
discouraged, for the self-pity of the invalid 
never deprived him of his strong man's 
humor. "When I drive out and notice 
the opening of spring, I feel sometimes 
almost moved to tears at the thought that in 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 93 

a little while I shall again have the use of 
my limbs, and be able to ramble about and 
enjoy these green fields and meadows. It 
seems almost too great a privilege. I am 
afraid when I once more sally forth and 
walk the streets, I shall feel like a boy with 
a new coat, who thinks everybody will turn 
around to look at him. 4 Bless my soul, how 
that gentleman has the use of his legs!'" 
A few days after this was written, he got 
word that one of his friends had just under- 
gone a successful surgical operation. " God 
bless these surgeons and dentists ! " he ex- 
claims. " May their good deeds be returned 
upon them a thousand fold! May they 
have the felicity, in the next world, to have 
successful operations performed upon them 
to all eternity ! " 

By this time he had come to take Spanish 
politics rather too seriously. The insincer- 
ity and profligacy of the Spanish character, 
the corruption of the court and state, fairly 
sicken him : " The last ten or twelve years of 
my life," he writes, " have shown me so much 
of the dark side of human nature, that I 



94 WASHINGTON IRVING 

begin to have painful doubts of my fellow 
men, and look back with regret to the con- 
fiding period of my literary career, when, 
poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld 
the world through the medium of my imagi- 
nation, and was apt to believe men as good 
as I wished them to be." His sense of re- 
sponsibility for the young queen oppressed 
him, and he looked forward impatiently to 
the hour of his release. 

A year later he had gained far better 
health and spirits. On his sixty-second 
birthday — "I caught myself bounding up- 
stairs three steps at a time, to the astonish- 
ment of the porter, and checked myself, re- 
collecting that it was not the pace befitting 
a minister and a man of my years." His 
mental life had, however, caught the sober 
tone of age. "I am now at that time of 
life when the mind has a stock of recollec- 
tions on which to employ itself ; and though 
these may sometimes be of a melancholy 
nature, yet it is a ' sweet-souled melancholy,' 
mellowed and softened by the operation of 
time, and has no bitterness in it. . . . 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 95 

When I was young, my imagination was 
always in the advance, picturing out the 
future, and building castles in the air ; now 
memory comes in the place of imagination, 
and I look back over the region I have 
traveled. Thank God, the same plastic 
feeling, which used to deck all the future 
with the hues of fairyland, throws a soft 
coloring over the past, until the very rough- 
est places, through which I struggled with 
many a heartache, lose all their asperity in 
the distance." 

In July, 1846, his successor arrived, and 
Irving was free to leave Europe for the last V 
time. His services in Spain had brought 
nothing but honor to himself and his 
country ; he had earned a right to the quiet 
years that followed in his favorite home nook 
at Sunny side. 

Soon after his return he began to busy 
himself with the revised edition of his works 
which he had projected in Spain. It was 
disheartening to find his old publishers 
dubious about undertaking the republication, 
and for a time the work went hard. " I am 



96 WASHINGTON IRVING 

growing a sad laggard in literature," he 
wrote to his nephew, " and need some one 
to bolster me up occasionally. I am too 
ready to do anything else rather than write." 
For more than a year his time was largely 
devoted to overseeing an enlargement of the 
cottage, and a renovation of the grounds, at 
Sunnyside. At last he got it all into satis- 
factory order. " My own place has never 
been so beautiful as at present. I have 
made more openings by pruning and cutting 
down trees, so that from the piazza I have 
several charming views of the Tappan Zee 
and the hills beyond, all set, as it were, in 
verdant flames; and I am never tired of 
sitting there in my old Voltaire chair of a 
long summer morning with a book in my 
hand, sometimes reading, sometimes musing, 
and sometimes dozing, and mixing all up in 
a pleasant dream." As for New York, 
" For my part, I dread the noise and tur- 
moil of it, and visit it but now and then, 
preferring the quiet of my country retreat ; 
which shows that the bustling time of life is 
over with me, and that I am settling down 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 97 

into a sober, quiet, good-for-nothing old 
gentleman." 

This was all very well — for a mood. He 
spent the next winter in town, moving freely 
in society, and " not missing a single per- 
formance " of the opera. " One meets all 
one's acquaintances at the opera, and there 
is much visiting from box to box, and plea- 
sant conversation, between the acts. The 
opera house is in fact the great feature of 
polite society in New York, and I believe is 
the great attraction that keeps me in town. 
Music is to me the great sweetener of exist- 
ence, and I never enjoyed it more abun- 
dantly than at present." Clearly, the old 
social instinct was by no means dead in him, 
however he might express himself in less 
buoyant moods. 

Two years after his return from Spain the 
house of Putnam agreed to publish the re- 
vised edition of his works on very liberal 
terms — a twelve and a half per cent, roy- 
alty. The result of the enterprise was a 
surprise to author and publisher, for during 
the ten remaining years of his life the royal- 



V 



98 WASHINGTON IRVING 

ties amounted to more than $ 88,000. The 
arrangement brought about an immediate 
accession of courage and power, and he re- 
turned with fresh zeal to the " Life of Wash- 
ington." " All I fear," he said, " is to fail 
in health, and fail in completing this work 
at the same time. If I can only live to fin- 
ish it, I would be willing to die the next 
moment. I think I can make it a most in- 
teresting book. If I had only ten years 
more of life ! I never felt more able to 
write. I might not conceive as I did in ear- 
lier days, when I had more romance of feel- 
ing, but I could execute with more rapidity 
and freedom." The consciousness of ap- 
proaching age grew stronger in him, but 
without weakening his capacity for enjoy- 
ment or his turn for humorous expression. 
Early in 1850, George Ticknor sent him a 
copy of his " History of Spanish Literature." 
Irving dipped into it, liked it, and " When 
I have once read it through," he wrote. " I 
shall keep it by me, like a Stilton cheese, to 
give a dig into whenever I want a relishing 
morsel. I began to fear it would never see 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 99 

the light in my day, or that it might fare 
with you as with that good lady who went 
thirteen years with child, and then brought 
forth a little old man, who died in the course 
of a month of extreme old age. But you 
have produced three strapping volumes, full 
of life and freshness and vigor, that will live 
forever." This sounds well for Ticknor; 
but it needs only a glance at Irving's re- 
corded correspondence to see that he was in- 
clined to overestimate the work of others. 
That kind heart must needs assume the func- 
tions of a head which was very well able to 
take care of itself. 

In larger matters his judgment was often 
colored, but seldom warped, by feeling. The 
line between sentiment and common sense is 
clearly drawn in his comment upon the Kos- 
suth obsession which held New York in 1852. 
"I have heard and seen Kossuth both in 
public and private, and he is really a noble 
fellow, quite the beau ideal of a poetic hero. 
. . . He is a kind of man that you would 
idolize. Yet, poor fellow, he has come here 
under a great mistake, and is doomed to be 
LofC. 



100 WASHINGTON IRVING 

disappointed in the high-wrought expecta- 
tions he had formed of cooperation on the 
part of our government in the affairs of his 
unhappy country. Admiration and sympa- 
thy he has in abundance from individuals ; 
but there is no romance in councils of state 
or deliberative assemblies. There, cool judg- 
ment and cautious policy must restrain and 
regulate the warm impulses of feeling. I 
trust we are never to be carried away, by the 
fascinating eloquence of this second Peter 
the Hermit, into schemes of foreign inter- 
ference, that would rival the wild enterprises 
of the Crusades." The letter concludes in 
a minor strain : " It is now half -past twelve 
at night, and I am sitting here scribbling in 
my study, long after the family are abed 
and asleep — a habit I have fallen much 
into of late. Indeed, I never fagged more 
steadily with my pen than I do at present. 
I have a long task in hand, which I am anx- 
ious to finish, that I may have a little lei- 
sure in the brief remnant of life that is left 
to me. However, I have a strong presenti- 
ment that I shall die in harness : and I am 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 101 

content to do so, provided I have the cheer- 
ful exercise of intellect to the last." 

By this time some of his Western invest- 
ments had begun to make handsome returns. 
With an easy pocket, and a single congenial 
task for his leisure, it seemed that Irving' s 
last years were certain to be peacefully 
rounded. Unfortunately his health did not 
hold; all his former ailments came back 
upon him, and the " Life of Washington " be- 
came an Old Man of the Sea, which one 
wishes heartily he might have been rid of. 
A visit to Saratoga in the summer of 1852, 
and the company of many pretty women, 
seemed for the moment to lift the years 
from his shoulders. " No one seemed more 
unconscious of the celebrity to which he had 
attained," wrote one of his Saratoga acquaint- 
ances, long after. " In this there was not a 
particle of affectation. Nothing he shrank 
from with greater earnestness and sincerity 
and (I may add) pertinacity, than any at- 
tempt to lionize him." His name was used 
to conjure with too often for his comfort. 
An " Irving Literary Union " had been 



102 WASHINGTON IRVING 

formed in New York. Irving's attitude to- 
ward it was amusing and characteristic ; he 
was always invited to attend the anniversary 
meeting, always accepted, and always stayed 
away. 

Events abroad continued to interest him. 
His sister had sent an account from Paris of 
the marriage of Louis Napoleon. "Louis 
Napoleon and Eugenie Montijo, Emperor 
and Empress of France ! " he wrote. " One 
of whom I have had a guest at my cottage 
on the Hudson ; the other of whom, when a 
child, I have had on my knee at Granada ! 
It seems to cap the climax of the strange 
dramas of which Paris has been the theatre 
during my lifetime." 

In 1855, "Wolfert's Boost" was pub- 
lished. Most of its contents had figured 
years before in the " Knickerbocker Maga- 
zine." It is one of the best of his miscella- 
neous collections, and should be better known 
to the modern reader of Irving. Thereafter, 
his work was over, except for the " Life of 
Washington," which was to appear in parts 
during the next three years. Its merits 



A PUBLIC CHARACTER 103 

were perhaps exaggerated at the time ; to 
the modern critic they lie chiefly in its pos- 
session of the lucid simplicity of method 
without which its author could not write, 
and in the life which it infuses into a cold 
abstraction. If this is not Washington, it 
is at least a living and breathing person, 
whose interest for us lies not altogether in 
his career. 

These closing years were sadly clouded by 
sleeplessness and depression of spirits, from 
which at times he roused himself to bursts 
of his old brilliancy and humor. A year 
before his death he said to one of the in- 
numerable inquiries about his health, " I 
have a streak of old age. Pity, when we 
have grown old, we could not turn round 
and grow young again, and die of cutting 
our teeth." A few months later, when he 
had begun to be troubled with difficulty of 
breathing, he had a long and prosy letter 
from a total stranger, who proposed a call. 
" Oh, if he could only give me his long 
wind," gasped Irving, " he should be most 
welcome." 



104 WASHINGTON IRVING 

We need not fellow here the rather piti- 
ful struggle of those last months. "I do 
not fear death," said he, " but I would like 
to go down with all sail set." The thoughts 
of the gradual loss of his faculties haunted 
him with curious insistency. He conceived 
a dislike for his own room, could not bear to 
be alone, and hung with pathetic eagerness to 
the companionship of the few whom he held 
dearest. His fear was groundless. To the 
end his mind remained clear ; and on the 
29th of November, 1859, he " went down 
with all sail set." 



VI 

THE MAN HIMSELF 

One is tempted to ask himself, in con- 
cluding a review of this man's life and 
work, what it was that he peculiarly stood 
for ; what new kind of excellence he brought 
into being, and how far it survived him. 
Oddly enough, the accident of his birthplace 
is made at once his chief merit, and the 
subtle derogation of that merit ; he is the 
first distinguished name in American letters, 
and he is " the American Addison." From 
the outset one who wishes to study his work 
is hampered by the fact of place. One must 
be always considering solemnly, " Although 
he was an American, he succeeded in doing 
this," or, " Because he was an American, he 
might have done that," till one is fairly in- 
clined to wish that his English parents had 
not happened to marry and settle in New 
York. As a matter of fact, there are few 



106 WASHINGTON IRVING 

writers against whom the point of national- 
ity may be pushed with less pertinence. 

It is plain that earlier American writing 
interests us only in a local and guarded 
sense. The critical microscope discovers 
certain merits ; but the least shifting of the 
eye-piece throws the object out of field. We 
value what these men wrote because of what 
they did as Americans, or stood for in 
American life. Of Irving and a few later 
writers this is not true. And our regard 
for them may lead us to suspect that from 
the literary point of view, it is better to be 
great than American ; or at least that there 
is no formula to express the ratio between a 
writer's Americanism and his literary power. 
The historian esteems a flavor of nation- 
ality in literature ; to the lover of pure let- 
ters, it is only a superior sort of local color. 
Irving's distinction is that he was the first 
prophet of pure letters in America. This is 
to speak thickly ; and it will not help mat- 
ters greatly to say that the mark of pure 
letters is style. The application of that 
foggy term to such a writer as Irving is 



THE MAN HIMSELF 107 

likely to be particularly unfair ; it has not 
been spared him. He has had more praise 
for his style than for anything else ; indeed, 
it has been commonly suggested that there 
is little else to praise him for. This is, of 
course, a survival of the old notion that style 
is a sort of achievement in decorative art ; 
that fine feathers may do much for the liter- 
ary bird, at least. The style of a writer 
like Irving — a mere loiterer in the field of 
letters — is at best a creditable product of 
artifice. To him even so much credit has 
not been always allowed ; the clever imita- 
tor of Addison — or, as some sager say, of 
Goldsmith — has not even invented a man- 
ner ; he has borrowed one. 

Fortunately, novelty of form is a very 
different thing from literary excellence. 
Irving wrote like a well-bred Englishman, 
brought up in the sound traditions of the 
days of good Queen Anne. Whatever local 
merit his work may have, belongs to theme 
rather than to treatment. Its delicate hu- 
mor is as far as possible from what has come 
to be known as American humor. His only 



108 WASHINGTON IRVING 

conscious Americanism in motive — to speak 
of him merely as an artist — was to show 
England that " an American could write 
decent English." At that time, it seems, 
Englishmen considered this to be a good 
thing for an American to do ; and the poet 
Campbell's remark was thought to be high 
praise : that Washington Irving had " added 
clarity to the English tongue." This was a 
service of which the language just then 
stood sadly in need. There are always men 
ready enough to make English turbid, to 
wreak their ingenuity upon oddities of phrase 
and diction. At that moment, certainly, 
the anxious courtier of words was not so 
much needed as the easy autocrat, whose 
style, however cavalier, should have grace 
and firmness and clarity to commend it. 
When Irving began to express himself, 
there was very little straightforward simple 
writing being done, either in America or in 
England. The stuffed buckram of John- 
sonese had been succeeded by the mincing 
hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her 
like. It is at least to Irving's credit that 



THE MAN HIMSELF 109 

his taste led him back half a century to the 
comparative simplicity and purity of the 
prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it 
should have been for this acquired manner 
that the world thought it liked him while he 
lived, and has chiefly praised him since he 
died. 

But after all, as was said of Milton in a 
different connection, Irving has worn "the 
garb, but not the clothes, of the ancients." 
His kinship to them in temper of thought 
and feeling was closer than his resemblance 
in manner. Like Addison and Goldsmith, 
he wins his audience through sheer charm of 
personality. To open one of his books is 
like meeting a congenial stranger. You like 
his looks at first glance, you feel somehow 
that he likes yours ; and while you may be 
hesitating about advances, he is at your side, 
and there is nothing more to be said. You 
do not care whether he is American or Eng- 
lish, you are not particular what he talks 
about, but you do not willingly part with 
him. 

The charm of creative genius is less the 



110 WASHINGTON IRVING 

charm of mind than of feeling. And it is 
to feeling refined and colored by tempera- 
ment, that the more delicate modes of belles- 
lettres owe their whole power. That is, a 
writer in this sort is admirable as he subdues 
language and subordinates thought to his 
own temper, not as he gives elegant utter- 
ance to thought or feeling in their abstracted 
and general estate. Through a surface arti- 
ficiality of style, which is far more marked 
in his earliest work, and from which at times 
he quite escapes, Irving's personality shines 
clearly. He has so employed a conventional 
medium as to make it serve his original pur- 
poses. He possessed, to be sure, a faculty 
of strong vernacular speech, which is little 
suggested in his to-be-published writing, or 
even in his private letters. The Oregon 
embroilment had led certain British journals 
into gross speech about America. Irving 
was much disturbed. What he wrote was, 
" A rancorous prejudice against us has been 
diligently inculcated of late years by the 
British press, and it is daily producing its 
fruits of bitterness." What he said was : 



THE MAN HIMSELF 111 

" Bulwer," — then English minister to 
Spain, — "I should deplore exceedingly a 
war with England, for depend upon it, if we 
must come to blows, it will be serious work 
for both. You might break our head at 
first, but by Heaven ! we would break your 
back in the end ! " 

But one need not write in the vernacular 
to be sincere and effective ; personality may 
utter itself through different media, whether 
in different tongues or in distinct strata of 
the same tongue. Just now we have a bent 
toward colloquialism on paper; it was not 
the bent of Irving's day. 

As far as the external features of his style 
are concerned, he has had praise enough, and 
more than enough. Clearness, ease, a cer- 
tain Gallic grace it has ; the ink flows read- 
ily, the thing says itself without crabbedness 
or constraint. On the other hand this ready 
writer is often conventional ; a set phrase 
contents him, why should he labor to escape 
the usual formula? He knew nothing of 
the struggle or the reward of the artist in 
words, who wrestles for the exact nuance. 



112 WASHINGTON IRVING 

and will not let a sentence go till he has 
obtained its blessing. Consequently he is 
never finicking in his phraseology, and sel- 
dom final. The subtle artfulness of Ste- 
venson is beyond him ; but he has a rarer 
quality — that subtler artlessness which has 
belonged in some measure to all the greater 
writers of sentiment. It is a quality inde- 
pendent of the mechanics of writing ; whether 
the author echoes the syntax of Addison or 
the diction of Goldsmith is an indifferent 
question. All that we know is that, through 
his use of words or in spite of it, a new mel- 
ody has come into being, a golden motif 
which is to ring in the world's ears nobody 
knows how long. 

It seems idle to say of such a man that 
because he does not concern himself with 
" the mystery of existence," and " the solemn 
eternities," he has nothing to say. Surely 
the simple-souled artist may leave such mat- 
ters for the philosophers and theologians to 
deal with. Surely his " message " is as sig- 
nificant as theirs. Irving is admirable not 
mainly because he " wrote beautifully." but 



THE MAN HIMSELF 113 

because he said something which no one else 
could say : he uttered the most meaning of 
all messages — himself. And if literature 
is really a criticism of life, such a message 
from such a man has, it would seem, dignity 
enough. 

Evidently Irving, like Goldsmith and 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, owed his amazing 
influence largely to his cheerful and whole- 
some this-worldliness. He was a sentiment- 
alist, but obviously different in spirit from 
the two great English writers of sentiment 
who were most nearly his contemporaries. 
Thackeray is sophisticated ; fortune's buffets 
have left him still a tender interest in life, 
but pity rather than hopefulness gives color 
to his mood. Dickens's sentiment seldom 
rings perfectly true ; too often it is sharped 
to flippancy, or flatted to mawkishness. The 
tone of Irving, in sentiment or in humor, is 
the clear and even utterance of a healthy na- 
ture. It was a period of sickly sentimental- 
ism in which he began to write ; men drew 
tears frequently and mechanically then, as 
they drew corks. The sentimentalist passed 



114 WASHINGTON IRVING 

easily from broad mirth to unwinking pathos. 
Fortunately that weakest mood of sentiment 
without humor came seldom to Irving ; he 
wrote only one " History of Margaret Nich- 
olson." 

It was his nature to be achingly consider- 
ate of others, so that he was a better friend 
than critic ; and he was as careful of their 
good opinion as of their comfort. Always 
doubtful what treatment his work would 
meet, and even what it deserved, he would 
ask his friends to say nothing about it, un- 
less they liked it. " One condemning whis- 
per," said one of them, " sounded louder in 
his ear than the plaudits of thousands." So- 
cially, on the other hand, he never had the 
least doubt of himself. The tastes and man- 
ner of a gentleman did not need to be ac- 
quired ; there was no question of his fitness 
for any society. During his whole career, 
thrown as he was into the choicest company 
of two continents, there was evidently not 
the least suspicion of embarrassment or awk- 
wardness in his quiet bearing. 

He was in the largest sense of the word a 



THE MAN HIMSELF 115 

generous man ; and even in the smaller sense 
his generosity has distinction and signifi- 
cance. Addison we know to have been a 
little on the hither side of open-handedness. 
Goldsmith was by his own satirical confes- 
sion the "good-natured man," to whom giv- 
ing was a conscious indulgence. Irving was 
simply not aware that he gave ; to share his 
best was a natural function. And it is our 
sense of this, of being admitted as a matter 
of course to share in all that he is and has, 
which largely explains his delightfulness as 
man and author. 

Citizen of the world as he was in his liter- 
ary character, in practical life his American- 
ism was real and potent. He deplored the 
"War of 1812 and the war with Mexico, but 
believed firmly that it was no man's duty to 
go back of the government's decision. In 
the conduct of his mission to Spain he showed 
the utmost steadiness, loyalty, and self-pos- 
session in many trying situations. He was, 
in short, a valuable citizen, to whom honors 
came unsought, and who, out of office, and 
not desirous of political power, was trusted 



116 WASHINGTON IRVING 

by all parties, and tempted by none. The 
mere existence of such a figure, calm, sim- 
ple, incorruptible, honored wherever he was 
known, and known prominently throughout 
Europe, was a valuable stay to the young 
republic in that purgatorial first half of the 
nineteenth century. 

One fact about him will perhaps bear em- 
phasis ; that with all his gentlenesses he was 
strong and firm and full of spirit. He was 
susceptible to advice, yet nobody ever forced 
him to do a thing that was against his mind 
or conscience. That he was amiable, con- 
genial, companionable — we do not forget 
these traits of his ; we should remember, too, 
that he never faced an emergency to which 
he did not prove himself equal. His per- 
sonal hold upon his contemporaries was 
plainly due to the fact that their confidence 
in him as a man was as perfect as their de- 
light in him as an artist. What he did was, 
after all, only a little part of what he was. 



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